Line #2 Fridge/AChristmasCarol


1	!!FridgeBrilliance:
2	* The appearance of the Ghosts:
3	** The Ghost of Christmas Past is flickering, translucent, and indistinct because Scrooge is trying to forget his past, to make it not exist. The bright halo that surrounds it reminds one that the past can never be completely forgotten.
4	** The harder he tried to snuff out the Ghost's light, the brighter it gets until it's blinding. Scrooge's refusal to accept his past blinds him to the reality of his present life.
5	** The Ghost of Christmas Present changes in appearance, because the present is always changing.
6	** The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come being a dark, hooded figure representing the future's uncertainty and his resemblance to the Grim Reaper, which shows the future we must all eventually face: death. Also, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the only one of the three who does not speak and said to look like a phantom, describing how the future is not decided yet and that Scrooge's life can in fact end in a better way than shown.
7	* Scrooge saying that Marley is a mean hallucination brought on by some gravy or beef he had eaten is a flimsy excuse considering he only had eaten cheap porridge. This would give the viewer evidence that the ghost may be real.
8	** He did not just eat gruel though. The story says that he had a cheap pub dinner before going home and having the gruel because he has a cold.
9	* It might seem confusing, that with the present unaltered, Scrooge would have been dead by next Christmas (assuming that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come moved only one year forward), but the ending implies that he lived for many more years. However, having a looser, more relaxed lease on life, as reformed Scrooge did, can lead to lower blood-pressure, being less likely to suffer from strokes and heart attacks, and overall improved health. Going further, the cause of his death in the unaltered timeline was not his age as one might have thought. It could have been anything from his high blood-pressure to the stress on his heart, to living in an unheated house and eating nothing but cheap food. Marley really did give Scrooge a second chance; by prolonging his life to give him more time to repent.
10	** Alternatively, it's explicitly stated that Scrooge originally died "[[DyingAlone lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself]]" on Christmas Eve. His attempts to push everyone away [[WantingIsBetterThanHaving left him completely alone in the end]], with no one to take care of him. In the "new" future, the attack that would've killed him probably occurred while he was in the friendly company of Fred (who would probably have invited him for dinner) or Bob, meaning they could fetch him a doctor and/or help nurse him back to health. Scrooge's no-longer-stingy self might simply have been willing to spend the money for the warmth, medicine and care necessary for him to survive an ordinary gastrointestinal or respiratory infection. A man who'd grudged even the cost of enough coal to keep the ink from freezing in his office's inkwells could have easily succumbed to a case of the flu, merely because he wouldn't "waste" a penny on even his own health.
11	* Tiny Tim living due to Scrooge’s newfound generosity has been hotly debated by numerous fans because Dickens never explicitly stated what was wrong with the boy. As it turns out, [[TruthInTelevision there are multiple possibilities of diseases that were treatable at the time, but could easily be debilitating and fatal otherwise, especially to those living in poverty.]] Many diseases of the 19th century can be explained by hardship or simply malnutrition. If Cratchit did get a raise, then he could provide a more healthy environment for his family.
12	* One possible explanation for Tiny Tim's incapacity is child labor: if Cratchit is barely getting by on Scrooge's salary, then Tiny Tim might have to work in a factory to help support his family, which wasn't uncommon when the book was published. Considering how dangerous these places were, poor Tiny Tim must've suffered a serious accident. In a sad way, Tiny Tim's illness is a direct byproduct of Scrooge's miserliness, since if his father could support him, then he wouldn't have to get a dangerous job to survive.
13	* If Tiny Tim died in the other future, it could also explain Scrooge's early death: [[DeathByDespair grief]]. Not intervening to prevent the son of his clerk from dying would've driven even Scrooge's cold heart to despair. He'd have the same fate as Marley: mourning his failure to care for his fellow man but not having the means to fix his mistakes.
14	* In the book, Scrooge is described as having a reasonably unattractive appearance. But attractiveness is more than just looks, it is also about personality and how you treat others. Scrooge turns off a lot of people because his temper isn't good. Scrooge becoming more outgoing would make him far more likable. Enough that people could overlook his aged appearance.
15	* The ghosts (depending on the adaptation) often bear some semblance to either Ebenezer himself, or to the aspect of Scrooge's life they represent: the candle/glowing figure of the past is indistinct yet bright, because he does not wish to remember the past yet cannot forget it; the large and boisterous ghost of the present often either somewhat looks like a "jolly fat" version of Scrooge or otherwise depicts what a man with his life could be doing if he had the Christmas spirit; so why does the ghost of the future not just look "shadowy and indistinct" but rather ''explicitly'' like TheGrimReaper? Well, when you're Scrooge's age, especially in that time frame, there's really only one thing you can expect in the future...
16	* When Scrooge asks if Tiny Tim will live, the Ghost of Christmas Present predicts "a vacant seat and a crutch without an owner". While initially it's a prediction of Tim's death should the future remain unchanged, it could still work even in the new future created by Scrooge's repentance: [[ProphecyTwist the much healthier Tim will be active (i.e. not sitting down) and not needing his crutch]].
17	* Scrooge's laundress and charwoman (cleaning lady) ought to have been familiar to him, at least vaguely. It illustrates the depth of his own former misanthropy and miserliness, that he doesn't immediately recognize people who work for him as soon as they enter old Joe's shop. If he had, he'd have gotten a clue about the identity of the man in the bed much sooner, and the shock of [[spoiler:seeing his name on the gravestone]] would've been greatly lessened.
18	* Scrooge's visitations by all three Christmas ghosts were necessary, their work combining into a multi-step treatment (think [=IcyHot=]). The Ghost of Christmas Past helps Scrooge remember how open his heart used to be and the Ghost of Christmas Present shows him things that warm his heart, but it takes the involvement of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to ensure he changes his ways for good.
19	* The Ghost of Christmas Present turning old and then ‘dying’ symbolises both Scrooge and Tiny Tim. The spirit ageing symbolises that Scrooge who is also old has very precious time left to put things right including getting Tiny Tim well again before it is too late. And his ‘death’ not only foreshadowed the same fate will happen to Scrooge but his death also reminds Scrooge Tiny Tim doesn't have long to live unless Scrooge repents.
20	* Marley's assistance for Scrooge didn't go ''entirely'' unrewarded for Marley himself. Yes, by all appearances he's still doomed to wander, an invisible witness to the living world with which he can no longer interact ... but at least he can now remember having done something to bring happiness to those he's observing. He can hold close to the memory that he ''did'' perform at least one act of charity (albeit a posthumous one) and thus, turn what he might once have shared to happiness.
21	** In fact, this posthumous act of kindness might have been the only way available for him to lessen his own chains as well.
22	* Speaking of chains, Marley mentions he saw those of Scrooge and they were longer and heavier than Marley's. Even if you suppose Scrooge wasn't objectively worse than Marley (as we only see Marley as a repentant ghost, we have no way to know either way), he outlived his partner by years, time spent only adding to his sins and thus punishment.
23	** Marley explicitly says that when he died seven years ago, his chains and Scrooge's were the same length. Scrooge then spent those seven years making his own even longer.
24	* Scrooge exhibits many of the traits typically associated with the GreedyJew stereotype; however, by making it a Christmas story and depicting the reformed Scrooge attending a church service, the story denotes Scrooge as Christian - perhaps serving as Dickens' reminder to Christian financiers in London that ThisLoserIsYou and helping demolish the Jewish stereotype.
25	* Scrooge scorns Fred as a poor person, yet Fred doesn't seem to be badly off: he has a family and is prosperous enough to enjoy a decent Christmas celebration. Fred is probably successful, but because he is willing to spend time and money on friends, family, and good works, he doesn't have as much money as his uncle, nor does he hoard it as obsessively. [[GoodIsNotDumb Also in any business, goodwill is extremely important, and Fred is such a cheerful man he can easily obtain enough goodwill to have a steady stream of customers]]. Scrooge's contempt toward his nephew speaks volumes about his avarice that he only judges a person by their wealth and not how they use it.
26	* It is easy to see why in the BadFuture Scrooge is so hated there aren't any mourners for him: not paying Crachit enough led to Tiny Tim dying. The fact that Scrooge was too cheap to provide for his employer's son would put him BeyondRedemption in the eyes of many, including his own nephew.
27	** To add to this: The BadFuture scenes dealing with Tiny Tim's death and Scrooge's death don't necessarily take place at the same Christmas. The narrator writes that they seem to take place in no particular order, save that they're all in the future. Based on the Ghost of Christmas Present's prediction, the Tiny Tim scene takes place only a year in the future, but since the ending seems to imply that Scrooge lives quite a while longer after his redemption, the scenes dealing with his own death might take place many years later. We also learn that in this dark timeline, Fred learns about Tiny Tim's death soon after it happens. Maybe this explains why Fred finally stopped reaching out to his uncle in this timeline, and why not even he looked after him in his final illness or mourned his death.
28	* Scrooge's BadFuture fate, his corpse being robbed by his unsympathetic employees, isn't just a way to scare him but an [[LaserGuidedKarma eerily appropriate fate for a man so greedy]]: Scrooge only judged people by their monetary worth. It's only fitting that after being terrible to others, people would only care about the value of his meager possessions.
29	* There is another symbolism of Marley’s chains as they have associations of imprisonment. At the time of the novel was published, people could go to debtors prison for their unpaid debts. Marley and Scrooge’s job probably involved sending their clients to debtors prison, if they can’t pay back the money they owe them. In a way Marley’s punishment is [[ATasteOfTheirOwnMedicine a constant reminder of the suffering of the people he had sent to prison.]]
30	* During the scene before Marley's first appearance, the book says every bell in the house started ringing and many film depictions show a line of servant bells, attached to various other rooms via pull-cords.This means that Scrooge is living in the large house Marley had owned, but staying in the servants' quarters. Why? Simply because there is room enough for him, and it would be cheaper to heat than one of the "master of the house" rooms.
31	* There's a very subtle bit of Fridge Brilliance hidden in Fred's Christmas party. Fred's wife is described as taking part in all the word games and the music, but not in any games that involve physical activity, such as blind man's buff. Instead, during those games, she settles in the corner with a comfy chair and enjoys the fun going on around her. On Christmas Day, when the reformed Scrooge shows up at their home for dinner, he comes upon them putting the last few touches on their table, and startles Fred's wife. Scrooge mentally kicks himself for startling his niece, remembering how she sat out the blind man's buff game in the corner. Of course, she wasn't to exert herself physically, and shouldn't have been startled...Dickens is indicating, in the most Victorian-approved way possible, that she is pregnant!
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33	!!FridgeHorror
34	* At the end of the story, Marley is still damned to eternal torment, even after going to bat for Scrooge in the afterlife. Marley specifically states that Scrooge's second chance is "of Marley's procuring." So, if Scrooge had happened to die first, would it have been a Scrooge ghost damned to eternal torment and Marley having Christmas adventures with three spirits after his good damned buddy Scrooge interceded for him? The salvation of a man's soul comes down to a coin flip? Now there's a chilling thought. And that's the point Dickens was trying to make when he told the reader that Marley was dead to begin with, it was too late for him but it's not too late for Scrooge. You can only change yourself when you are alive.
35	** Then again, if Marley's ghost was allowed to visit Scrooge, perhaps this implies that whatever entity governs the afterlife is merciful enough to grant Marley a ''chance'' to right some wrongs. Marley was repentant, and this is an important step toward atonement. So Marley's afterlife may not be as bleak as it appears since he and his ghost pals did change someone for the better.
36	* Pointed out elsewhere on this wiki, and pertaining to Scrooge's line how if the poor are going to die, "they had better do it and decrease the surplus population" (which has already been thrown back in his face by the Ghost of Christmas Present). When the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him the Cratchit family mourning Tiny Tim's death, that line is probably still in his mind. What must he be thinking?
37	** This is made worse if you know the full speech given by the ghost. In the book, after the ghost echoes Scrooge's words back at him, it asks who he (Scrooge) is that he can decide who and what the surplus population is, and wraps up by telling him that in the eyes of heaven, it may be that Scrooge is less fit to live then Tiny Tim.
38	* Martha Cratchit is a milliner's apprentice. Millinery is the making of hats, which Dickens and his contemporaries of the time knew to be a very dangerous profession due to the mercury used in the process; it was tragically common for milliners to go insane and die prematurely. The phrase "mad as a hatter" predates the book by decades. Dickens is hinting that, because of the poverty of the Cratchit family and the work they are forced to find, Tiny Tim is not the only Cratchit child due for a terrible fate in the future.
39	* The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge a very dark future for the Cratchits with the death of Tiny Tim, but it's even darker than explicitly stated: [[spoiler:Scrooge is dead too]], which means Bob is newly unemployed and the already dirt-poor Cratchit family has lost their main source of income. (Cratchit may find another situation, but if it were easy, he'd have done so already.) Fortunately, this is only a fictitious bit of Fridge Horror even in-universe, as the Yet-To-Come shadows that Scrooge sees never come to pass.
40	** There's an additional HopeSpot in Fred's appearance. While in the moment it's the young man's kindness and sincere devastation at the news of a child's death that means the most to Bob, Fred also did something very generous. He offered his uncle's clerk a business card--very much a Victorian duty-of-care gesture. As Martha points out, that's all but an explicit offer to get Peter a better-paying job or even a true apprenticeship, if not Bob himself; the kind of thing that could single-handedly lift the family out of the desperate poverty that just killed Tiny Tim. The Cratchits, even in the bad future, are no longer alone.
41	*** This is even something that would have been obvious to Scrooge, and a terrible condemnation. Much like the little family for whom his death was their salvation, it would mark Scrooge as an ''utter'' failure as a man and an employer that his clerk's family only began receiving the benefits of ''his own societal connections'' once he was dead and out of the way, and his sister's son was free to step in.
42	* Meta example, because it only happens in ShowWithinAShow adaptations: there's a HopeSpot towards the end where Tiny Tim walks without his crutches (becomes an ExaggeratedTrope in {{Film/Scrooged}} where Olympic Gold Medalist [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Retton Mary Lou Retton]] does a flippin' ''gymnastics routine''). This is before the dirt-poor Cratchits learn of Scrooge's HeelFaceTurn which could mean his death in the BadFuture wasn't from SoapOperaDisease, but being forced by necessity to take a factory job that, at the time, was known for unsafe working conditions.
43	** Which wouldn't be too surprising, [[WriteWhatYouKnow seeing as Charles Dickens himself had to work in such conditions as a child]].
44	* In the BadFuture, Scrooge's possessions are pawned off by the undertaker and one of Scrooge's servants. While stealing the possessions of the dead man is bad enough, what if those people actually ''killed'' Scrooge? He was so hated, not only would people kill him just to rob his stuff, but no one would actually care if he was murdered.
45	** Just to cap it off, the fact that an ''undertaker'' was among the posthumous looters could well imply that it wasn't just Scrooge's bedclothes that were sold off. Body snatching for medical colleges was a thriving black-market industry in Britain at the time, and the cadaver of an old man nobody would miss could fetch a good price. The grave Scrooge is shown at the end of his Christmas Future journey ''may have been empty.''
46	*** This is actually rather unlikely, fortunately for Scrooge. Dickens write the story in 1843 and if we assume it took place in that year, the "resurrection" business was essentially over by then. The Anatomy Act of 1832 helped to end it, as well as the incredibly bad reputation of body sellers. Scotland had seen a rash of murders in 1828 by two fellows named Burke and Hare, who ran a boardinghouse and found that getting their lodgers drunk, murdering them, and selling the corpses paid a lot better than innkeeping. The public eventually found the practice of purchasing bodies utterly vile, and it died out by the time Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Besides that, the person selling Scrooge's stuff was "the undertaker's man", i.e., his assistant, not the undertaker himself, and could not have pilfered Scrooge's corpse without being caught.
47	* Scrooge's miserliness isn't just kind of off-putting, but it had serious consequences: he paid his clerk too poorly to be able to keep Tiny Tim alive, he refused to give charities that would help the poor, and believed the poor would die. While Scrooge isn't the worst guy on Earth and isn't ''actively'' cruel, [[LackOfEmpathy he sees the suffering in the world as less important than his bottom line]]. If Jacob Marley was the same way, it is no wonder he has been tormented in the afterlife: ignoring suffering can be just as bad as causing it.
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49	!!FridgeLogic
50	* Moved to [[Headscratchers/AChristmasCarol Headscratchers]] page.

Context Fridge / AChristmasCarol