Faith Moore (0:01)

Hello and welcome to the Storytime for Grown Ups Christmas Spectacular. I'm Faith Moore and for the month of December we'll be reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Each episode I'll read one chapter from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built in notes. So brew a pot of tea or a mug of hot chocolate, find a cozy chair, throw another log on the fire and settle in. It's story time. Foreign welcome back. It is so lovely to be with you one more time in December. I hope you've enjoyed the Christmas Spectacular. It was so much fun to do and I've loved having this story and all your questions and comments and thoughts about it be a part of my life throughout the Christmas season. It's really made me think about my attitudes and my traditions and the various kind of Christmas trees stressors that inevitably come up. It's made me think about all of those things in a really new and different way and I hope it's had that effect on you too in some way. So thank you. Thank you for being a part of this and for making this show what it is. So today we're going to wrap up our conversation about A Christmas Carol. I have a few questions and comments that I'm going to read and I'll do my best to kind of tie up the various strands we've been discussing so that we can leave this book as move on to the next. Which brings me just for a moment before we do that, to the topic of the next book. Did you catch the trailer? Right? If you didn't, we are reading the Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. If you did miss the trailer, I do recommend that you check it out. It's probably the episode that's right before this one in your podcast feed because I do give a little bit of information about the book there that I'm not really going to go into today. But I just want to say that I'm so excited about this book. I know it's a lesser known one than the books that we've read so far, and I assume that some of you, when you listen to the trailer were like, what? What are you talking about? What is that? But seriously, this is my second favorite book of all time after Jane Eyre and I cannot wait to share it with you. So January 2nd is when we'll begin talking about that book. That will be the intro episode where I'll give you some additional information about the book and the author and just kind of set the scene like we did for A Christmas Carol so that episode won't have any chapters in it. The book itself will begin on January 6, which is the following Monday. But I'll tell you much more about the book and why I chose it and everything on January 2nd. So keep those emails coming about your reactions to our selection if you've written already. Thank you I'm getting those emails, but I would love to share a few reaction emails at some point in one of our early episodes. And also I just really want to know what your reactions are. So write and tell me what you think of the book that we've picked for January. Faith K. Moore.com and click on Contact. Or you can just scroll down to the link in the show notes and that's how you can get in touch with me A couple of other housekeeping things. This is the last episode in December. We'll take Thursday and Monday off for Christmas New Year's, so you won't get any episodes on those two days. And then we'll be back, as I say, with the Intro episode on January 2nd and continue on January 6th with the start of the book. Another thing to let you know about, I said last time that I had signed off on a new design for the Merch store. Well, it is there now. So if you scroll down to the show notes and click on the link to the Merch Store, you'll find our new design, which is for all of you Jane Eyre enthusiasts. It's a beautiful design by the very talented Cynthia Angula, who's doing all these designs for us. I'm so happy with it. So I hope you'll check that out and you can get it on all sorts of cool things like shirts and bags and mugs and like folks cases. There's tons of things there, as well as the original design, which is the Storytime for Grown Ups logo. In January, I hope to get designs up for Pride and Prejudice and A Christmas Carol and the Woman in White as well, so watch this space. Also, I just want to say a quick thank you to everyone who bought my book Christmas Carol this December. I've been sending out book plates like crazy and I just feel so touched by all your comments about the book and by your willingness to pick up a copy and give copies as gifts. You know, writing a novel is a funny thing because you do it completely alone and you live in the world of the book and hang out with the characters you're creating for such a long time. And then Suddenly it's out there in the world and sometimes I just want to kind of climb into the experience of the people reading it and know what it's like to experience it as a reader. And all your wonderful comments and your compliments about it have been so touching and so gratifying. So thank you so much for that. I'm really moved by your responses and your support. The winner of the drawing, right? I was holding a drawing for either a signed copy or your money back. So the winner of that will be notified today if you're listening in real time. So Monday. So keep an eye on your email if you entered that. And thank you to everyone who did enter. Thank you. As well as always to those of you who've been buying me teas on my donation page. I really, I continue to be so humbled and touched by your generosity. And it makes. Makes me really excited because like I keep saying, if this show generates income, then I can focus my work time on it instead of other work things. So making a donation is a way to support the work I'm doing and also to grow the show and to see more new and exciting things from the show as we go along. So thank you for those donations. I really do appreciate them so much. All right, let's start wrapping up our discussion of A Christmas Carol. So last time we read Steve 5, which is called the End of It, and that's what it was, the end of A Christmas Carol. So the recap is essentially just that. Scrooge came out of this experience with the spirits, a totally changed man. And the thing that changed about him was the way that he sees the world, right? Suddenly he is filled with joy. He's giving away money left, right, and center. He sends a giant turkey to the Cratchits, and he donates a huge sum of money to the people collecting funds for the poor. And he's just delighted with everyone around him, even strangers. And the people around him can see that. And whereas before they were running away from him, now they're wishing him Merry Christmas. He does go to dinner with Fred, and Fred and his wife are thrilled to have him there. And he gives Bob Cratchit a raise and Tiny Tim gets well again and everyone lives happily ever after. Please pass the tissues. Right, so I'd like to begin our wrap up discussion by reading three short comments that I got this time. And I think you'll see as I read them that they are related. And I'd like to use them as a kind of springboard to discussing something Which I think is the key to the end of this book. You know, last time our theme ended up being death, which was a bit dark for a Christmas book, but I hope you ended up feeling like it was justified. But today I think our theme is joy. I want to end our discussion of this book talking about joy, and I think these comments are going to help us to do that. So here they are. The first one comes to us via X From the handle hurch0724. Why do I find myself tearing up at Scrooge being welcomed into Fred's house for Christmas dinner? The joy leaps off the page. I only wish I could binge your episodes, but I can't wait to hear each one. The next one comes from Caleb C. Hoover. Caleb writes this podcast is great. I wanted to respond to Stave5 in particular because I got kind of choked up at the ending. I've seen adaptations of A Christmas Carol before, but never read or listened to the book. I haven't reacted to this story that way. And the last one comes from Joy Brown. Joy writes, this is my first time reading A Christmas Carol. It made me cry. I feel cheated because I thought I knew this story when I actually didn't know it at all. Thank you so much. So one of the things that Dickens is truly a master at, I think, is his ability to conjure this absolute, riotous, chaotic, jam packed abundance of love and connection and joy. You do cry at the end of this book. I mean, maybe not everyone, but I would say it's a very common occurrence to cry at the end of A Christmas Carol. You cry not because you're sad, but because you are suddenly, startlingly, absolutely filled to the brim with joy. And I'm using joy here deliberately instead of happiness. And I'll get to the distinction in a minute. But for now, the thing that is so wonderful about Stave 5 is that after the Ghost of Christmas Future section Stave 4, where we're really focused on death and all these kind of sordid people, like cackling over Scrooge's demise, essential, we are suddenly flung unceremoniously into a world absolutely brimming with joy. And it's brilliant because that's exactly what happens to Scrooge, right? Scrooge has been living this life of total disconnection. He's been actively turning down love, actively turning down connection, choosing at every turn to give up on the things that make us human. And it's been a cold, bitter, miserly existence. The feeling of Scrooge's Life is the feeling of. In that rag and bone shop, right? Of being in that desolate room with the corpse, of being Bob Cratchit in the tank. Being Scrooge feels like that. And now suddenly, shockingly, joy, right? And in the same way that Stave four feels like death, Stave five feels like joy. So what do I mean by joy? Because we often use that word kind of interchangeably with happiness, right? But happiness, to my mind at least, is. Is a much more fleeting kind of superficial feeling. You can be joyful in your happiness, but you can also be joyful in grief. You can be joyful in sorrow and in times of hardship and in times of uncertainty. But I don't know that you can be happy in those times, really. To me, joy is a sense of the fullness of life, the abundance of life. It's a sense of the absolute wonderfulness of being human. Joy is what the Cratchits feel at the death of Tiny Tim, right? This sense that they got to be the family of this beautiful boy, that their lives are richer and fuller because Tiny Tim was in it, right? This sense that they would never ever go back and live their life without him, simply to avoid the pain of his death, the acceptance of death as a given and life as the thing that matters. That's joy. We can be joyful in grief, we can be joyful in uncertainty. Like, just to use a personal example, right at the beginning of December, I sent out query letters to a bunch of literary agents for my latest novel. And it's really nerve wracking, right? This waiting to hear back about something that's really important to me. It's disappointing when someone writes back to say no. It's like this emotional roller coaster when one says that they want to read the book and then there's more waiting and then the email is saying no again. I'm sure we've all had an experience like this, right? Waiting to find out if we got into a school, if we got a job, whatever it is. And it's easy to be consumed by it, to worry and worry and fall into a kind of pit of despair if we don't get what we want. But approaching a situation like that with joy means being aware that all the uncertainty and even the disappointment is part of the doing of the thing. We could not do it. I could not query agents. You could not apply for a job. But then our lives would be smaller and less full. We would have less fulfillment. We have to experience grief and disappointment and uncertainty and frustration in order to Live a full and complete life. And joy is the understanding that all of that is part of the project. All of that is the big, beautiful project of being human beings. And Scrooge had turned that all off. You know, I got another letter recently that made an excellent point. It's from Dan McGuire. And Dan writes, Scrooge right from the start, reveals his fatal flaw. And then he quotes from the. It's enough for a man to understand his own business and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. So I love this comment because Dan is right. There is Scrooge's thesis, right, stated very clearly right from the beginning. He's turned off everything that has to do with connecting with others. He's opted out of the connection and the love. And because of that, he's never disappointed. He's never racked with grief. He's never sitting through an agony of uncertainty. But he's also missing the love and the joy and the connection. You can't have one without the other. And joy is the understanding of that. It's the sense that being human is a wonderful thing. It's entering into that fully with all that that encompasses. And that is what Scrooge is given by his experience with the spirit. He's given the capacity for joy, the capacity to live fully, to experience completely the fullness of being human. I mean, part of what we see in Stave 5 is the way in which totally normal, totally mundane things suddenly fill Scrooge with absolute kind of merriment and joy. Here's a quote. It says he had never dreamed that any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness, right? So he's happy because he's suddenly bought back into the human experience. But not everything makes him happy. Not happy. In fact, he experiences embarrassment and shame pretty much right away, right? He meets the man who asked for donations for the poor, and it says, here's another quote. It sent a pang across his heart to think how this old gentleman would look upon him when they met. But he knew what path lay straight before him and. And he took it. So he could just walk on by and not talk to this man. Because his embarrassment about the way that he spoke to him before might overcome him and make it far too hard to admit that he was wrong. But he doesn't do that at all. And he knows immediately that that's not what he's going to do. Joy isn't about feeling happy all the time. It's about entering into the fullness of the human experience and shouldering the embarrassment in order to get at the ultimate good of making right something that he done wrong. It's the same with going over to Fred's house for dinner. It's hard for him to do this. He's nervous. He doesn't know if Fred will accept him, given how definitively he told him no the day before and the way he's treated him for many years, at least it would be easy for Scrooge to say, well, I won't bother him, right? That ship has sailed. That door is closed. But he goes and he asks for forgiveness. And he asks to be included in the love and the fun and the connection. Joy is the knowledge that it's better to ask than to be guided by fear. Joy chooses life and love and connection every time. And here's the most wonderful thing about all this. To me, here's what makes this story one of the most remarkable pieces of writing. I think nothing material actually changes for Scrooge. He doesn't get to go back in time and get the girl, after all. He doesn't get to go back and be part of Fred's life from his infancy. He doesn't get to go back and be kinder to Bob Cratchit or help to Tiny Tim. Nothing changes, but everything does, right? I think if this story were being written by, like, a less masterful writer, that is what would happen. Scrooge would wake up as a young man again and have it all to do over. Or this whole experience would be happening to a younger Scrooge, and the final scene would have him, like, running through the airport to get the girl before she boards the plane that will, you know, take her away from him forever. I mean, we've all seen that scene, right? But he doesn't get to do any of that. Belle is still married to someone else. Scrooge has no children and probably never will. Fred is still an adult. Bob has still been mistreated. Tiny Tim has still struggled. All of the things that were true at the beginning are true at the end. So what does that mean? What is the thing that makes Scrooge's transformation such a riot of joy? Right? The only thing that has changed is Scrooge's attitude about life. The only thing that's different is that he's gone from total disconnection to total connection. But that is everything. And the regret that he might feel about not having the girl or missing out on his time with Fred or any of it, the disappointment is part of it. He might feel that disappointment, that regret. But okay, Right. Some things are disappointing. Some things bring us regret. Joy is the knowledge that all of it is part of life. All of it is part of being human. The gift that Scrooge is given is the gift of joy, of life in abundance. And that's it. Nothing material, no do overs. Which means that we could have that, too. I mean, yes, Scrooge's transformation happens magically, but the result is completely and utterly mundane. The result is simply an attitude shift, a reorientation away from disconnection and toward joy, toward connection and love and other people, toward an understanding of the fullness of life. And we could do that, too. We could reorient ourselves that way. I'm not saying that would be easy. I'm not saying, like, I've done it or that I do that all the time. I'm only saying that it's not impossible. In fact, I think this book is saying that it is the meaning of life. You know, one of the things I absolutely love about reading these books with you is that I always discover new things about them as we go. And I realize things that I never realized before. And this time I notice something that I think is really relevant to what we're talking about. Remember, all the way back in the first Stave, Marley shows Scrooge that the ghosts of people who didn't connect with others in their lifetimes are doomed to wander the earth, right? Witnessing the things that they might have shared but didn't share. The ways that they might have reached out in kindness and love and didn't reach out. And Marley is suffering this fate when we meet him. But, and this is what occurred to me, the gift that Marley gives to Scrooge via his experience with the spirits is the gift of seeing what it's like to be a ghost like Marley, like the other wandering spirits out the window before he's dead, while there is still time to make a difference. Scrooge gets to watch without being able to intervene. He gets to watch things that happened in his past and things that are happening now. He gets to see them as if he were a shade, to see what he is missing. But he's not dead yet. He's not really a shade. So he could change. He can do what Marley and the other ghosts can't in death, right? The ghosts realize the purpose of life, the thing they were missing in their selfishness and their greed or whatever. But it's too late for them. It's not too late for Scrooge. He doesn't get to go back. He can't marry Belle. He can't have a million children. He can't be a father to Fred. He can't prevent Tiny Tim from being crippled. But he can reorient his life toward love. He can reach out now. And moving forward, he can act differently now to the people around him and make changes moving forward, even though the past is still in the past. And all of this tells us something really important and actually kind of surprising. I think what it tells us is that life here, life here on Earth, this life that we are all living right now, is important. Yeah. I mean, part of it is about avoiding Marley's fate after death. But it's not just about what happens after death. It's about what happens now, here in this exact moment, in the grand, ultimately unknowable scheme of things. The life we are living right this second, your life right now, it matters. What you do with it matters. How you approach it and how you interact with the people around you matters. And that's a gift. It means that you. Yeah, you could be the recipient of joy. Even though bad things have happened in your past, even though you have regrets, even though there has been sadness and grief, even though you've made mistakes and hurt people and burned bridges that can't be rebuilt, whatever it is, whatever has happened to you, you could be the recipient of the sort of joy that Scrooge is feeling at the end of this book. Not by going back, but by going boldly right into the future via the present, via who you are and what you do right this moment. You know? I know, and I think Dickens knows, too, that Christmas is not happy for everyone. In fact, Christmas for many is a time of great sadness and deep regret. It's a time of missing loved ones who are gone, feeling lonely if you have no one to be with. It's a time of worry, maybe, that you won't make ends meet, or you won't get your kids the gifts they want, or maybe you won't be able to afford the things that you wish you could to get. You know, for many, Christmas is not the sort of riot of joy that we wish it were. But that's what's so beautiful about this story. Because if Scrooge can find joy in his life without changing anything material at all, then so can we, right? Not by doing away with all the bad things, but by accepting them as part of being human and reorienting our lives toward love. Reaching out, connecting, loving. Even when it's hard, even when it's embarrassing, even when it hurts. And hurts deeply, right? Living, opting in being fully and completely human. That is where the joy lies. Joy even in grief. Joy even in disappointment and regret. Joy in being a messy, ridiculous, comical, totally flawed human being. So to wrap all this up, I want to read you one more letter I got. It's from John Sullivan and here's what he comments at the introduction of the Christmas Carol opened my eyes as never before to the past, present, future aspects of the story and how they play out in our own lives. I'm 78, with three married children and eight grandchildren. I remember Christmas as a child, a single adult, a married father, and now as a grandfather. And I can imagine Christmases to come when I'm no longer around and my children children are the grandparents. My house was built in 1927 and my son's house is even older. Whenever I'm in an old house, I try to imagine the Christmases that went on there before any of us were born. I feel like a shade as described in the book. Thank you. So what I love about this comment is that we are all shades. We all have pasts. We all have times that will never come again. People who are gone forever. Children who are grown, parents who are old when they used to be young. We are not the children who ran down the hall to see if Santa came. We are the adults listening to the feet pattering down the hall. We are the grandparents whose children have grown tall. We are the shades of the future to our own pasts. And we are the shades of the past to our own futures. And in our future there is going to be loss. There is going to be sadness. There will be goodbyes large and small. Right? Our children will grow up. Our parents will grow old. Our friendships will shift, and our communities will morph and change. You know, at the end of Stave 4, Scrooge says he will, and here's a quote, live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. Right? We are the past, present, and the future. Right? That little baby that we held in our arms is the same person as the toddler who tells us he can do it all by himself. That toddler is the same person as the boy who walks home from school by himself for the first time. That boy is the teenager who goes off to college and the man who moves in with his wife. We hold within us all the people we have ever been and all the people we will one day become. We are the shades. We are the past, the present, and the future. And the point of life according to this book. I think the point of it all is to live into each version of ourselves with love. To experience it all with joy. So that is my hope for you this Christmas time, okay? That is my hope for all of us, always. That we can reorient our lives to love. That we can live in joy. Joy even in grief. Joy even in loss and fear and uncertainty. It isn't always easy. In fact, a lot of the time it is insanely hard. But that's why it's the work of a lifetime. You bring me joy. Truly you do. I am so grateful for you and I hope that you have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new Year. And I will be back with you again on January 2nd for our introduction to the Woman in White, and then again starting January 6th, and every Monday and Thursday after that to read the Woman in White together. I really hope that you'll join us. Be well, take heart, have hope, live in joy. And Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for listening and for being a part of the Storytime for Grown Ups Christmas Spectacular. Storytime for Grown Ups will take a quick break and return to you again on January 2nd when we'll begin our new book, the Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I hope to see you there.