But its importance is in the ending. The Spirit, shining brightly, observes to Scrooge that surely this ball is a very small thing—why should Fezziwig’s apprentices praise him so much for giving it? Scrooge retorts:

“He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up; what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (p. 39).

Once again, money is not the issue. It is the mind-set that matters and that has, ultimately, more power over joy or misery than money does.

But the younger Scrooge cannot grasp this point. He falls into “shadow” and casts aside love because it neither comes with money nor leads to money. The adult Scrooge is tormented by the picture of the family life that his cast-off fiancée achieves. For the first time, Scrooge feels his vaunted alienation as torment, not pleasure. He attacks the Spirit, squashing it beneath its cap, but he cannot “hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground” (p. 44).

The next Spirit is the Ghost of Christmas Present. The transformation of Scrooge’s barren room into the explosive cornucopia of plenty is a dramatic presentation of the psychological transformation working in Scrooge. Scrooge followed the Ghost of Christmas Past “on compulsion,” but he asks the Ghost of Christmas Present to lead him; he says he is learning a lesson. As he sets out with Christmas Present, his mind and spirit are more open to and appreciative of humanity. And that is what Christmas Present shows him, through a wide variety of places, not just the two usually depicted in time-strapped films. Again, money does not play a part. Whether on a dreary moor where miners live or at a storm-beaten lighthouse with only two keepers or among the London poor—or among the more well-off, such as Scrooge’s nephew—what the Spirit shows over and over again are people connected to each other, reaching out to each other, their spirits walking abroad among their fellow men.

In almshouse, hospital and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, [Christmas Present] left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts (p. 64).

In contradiction to that, Scrooge earlier comments on the proposed law to shut down the bakeries on Sunday. Ovens were not common in households in Dickens’s time, not in working-class and impoverished homes. Bakeries, however, had to keep their ovens warm at all times. Since they did not bake on Sundays (a religious day of rest), the poor were allowed to bake their dinners in the ovens. Periodically, attempts were made to shut down this practice, as being against the Sabbath. Scrooge accuses the Spirit, as the expression of Christianity, of seeking such a prohibition. The Spirit rejects this firmly:

“There are some upon this earth of yours ... who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us” (p. 51).

Dickens loathed cruelty practiced in the name of Christianity. He had good authority behind him; Jesus several times acts on the Sabbath and rebukes those who complain about it as not understanding God’s message to us or God’s desires for us. We are supposed to take care of each other, no matter what day of the week it is. Anything else is to distort the word of God.

There is a sad irony in Tiny Tim saying that “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see” (p. 53).