# 27 Dec 2005, 02:31PM: Charity:
It's the time of year for people to sing the I-got-horrible-gifts waaaaanthem. I have no such complaints, but several years ago, when I graduated from high school, my parents' friends gave me various inappropriate presents, including two self-help books. One was a primer on emotional intelligence. The other: a copy of A Christmas Carol with a huge Dickens-dwarfing epilogue or prologue dictating how the reader could undergo a Scrooge-like transformation.
Jessa Crispin pointed me to an essay on the moral lessons of A Christmas Carol by Michel Faber, author of The Crimson Petal And The White, and I figure that his take on the tale is much better than the self-help gobbledygook would have been. I would be remiss if I did not also point you towards James Morrow's fictional response to Dickens in Bible Stories For Adults.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.