My favorite Christmas story is Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol.” I particularly look forward to my annual viewing of the movie featuring George C. Scott. It is a heart-warming story of redemption and transformation.

That’s why I find it so unfair that the protagonist’s name has become synonymous with anti-Christmas greed and selfishness. Why must we remember the Scrooge at the start of the story and not the one at the end? After all, it was said “that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

People think I kid when I say that I want to be more like Scrooge each Christmas. I really mean it. I want to be the Scrooge who sends an enormous Turkey to the Cratchet family and gives shocking whispered sums to the poor and doubles Bob Cratchet’s salary and becomes a second father to Tiny Tim. I want to be ” as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.” How has this man’s name become anathema?

What makes it worse is that English already has so many splendid synonyms for a Scrooge:

• miser
• penny-pincher
• curmudgeon
• tightwad
• cheapskate
• money grubber
• stiff
• hoarder 
• skinflint