December Daily: holiday traditions

Prompt: wrabbit -- Favorite holiday traditions.

I celebrate Christmas, and for the last two years we've missed my favorite tradition: the annual read-aloud of "A Christmas Carol." This year when we were all together at Thanksgiving, I said, "Is it that I love this more than y'all do and you're ready to stop doing it?" and the spouse said, "No, I love it too, but I think we need to Start Early and Be Disciplined."

We have the big annotated version, which is kind of distracting, honestly, but it's nice to have words defined and amounts of money explained and allusions pointed out. There's a version that was written for readers' theater that can be read in one evening, and the full version is beautifully portioned out into five sections of readable length.

It benefits mightily from being read out loud, and even more from being read out loud repeatedly, so that the rest of the family chimes in on "I am a mortal, and liable to fall" and "a bachelor is a wretched outcast" and "They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me, putting it on him to be buried in" and "as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow."

"Why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?" is an all-purpose family lament, useful in a surprising number of circumstances.

If you want to watch a movie version, my hands-down favorite is the Muppet Christmas Carol. "Light the lamp, not the rat!"

( Not very relevant musings on the age of Ebenezer Scrooge )

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