12. Ebenezer? Good.

"And so this is Christmas and what have you done?

Another year older and a new one just begun…"

That's John Lennon, that is.  Asking a good question.  What have you done?

What's changed this year?  How have you changed this year?  For the better?  For the worse?

Me?  Ask me again at the end of the year.  It's been trying.  

Ebenezer Scrooge didn't have a year.  On that Christmas Eve when he was visited by four ghosts, it was shown to him that the next year he'd be under a cold stone slab in a graveyard.  Ebenezer had one night only, one night only, that's all he had (sorry, I went all Elaine Paige there for a moment).

The Marleys wailing: Caine and chains.

And I love Ebenezer Scrooge.

First, the name.  Ebenezer.  What irony!  The Victorians would have been more used to the name, not least as part of that hymn that declares "Here I raise my Ebenezer…"  They had perhaps a little more Bible knowledge than we do now, and might recall 1 Samuel…

Go and read it.

Ebenezer means "stone of help" and is the name given by Samuel to a stone raised as a memorial to a great battle in which Israel perceived that God had routed the Philistine army before them.  And so to call the antihero of A Christmas Carol Ebenezer was either Dickens' way of prefiguring the man of hope he would become - a second father to Tiny Tim and so quite the stone of hope - or else reminding us that not even a great name can protect us from becoming bitter and selfish.

The Ebenezer in 1 Samuel might have looked like this...

These days the name Ebenezer takes people's thoughts back to miserly Scrooge (or else to the Shamen singing Ebenezer Goode on Top Of The Pops: I always wondered what that record was about…) but back then when A Christmas Carol was published it was a respectable, upright name.

Anyway.  Ebenezer changes overnight, from a miserable skinflint to a man who happily sends an urchin off on an errand to buy a turkey, optimistically imagining that the Cratchits will have the cooker-space for it and be able to cook it in time for lunch.  My guess is that they'd still be trying to brown it at Hogmanay.  But Ebenezer changes.

And Christmas - which comes round rather regularly - is a good time to check your own pulse, your own spiritual health, your own family's health.  Christmas is when you notice who's missing (like Tiny Tim's crutches leaning unneeded against a wall): who's died and whom you've fallen out with and won't allow to darken your door.

Christmas is a good time to see whether your heart is still open to everyone, or whether the spirit of bah humbug has started to encroach.  You don't have to like Christmas jumpers and Paul McCartney's music, but if your love for humankind is waning, this is the time to notice and reverse the dynamic.

(Incidentally there's a species of snail called bah humbugi after Ebenezer's words.  How cool is that?)

Around the world and ever since it was written - 1843 - A Christmas Carol has inspired countless pastiches and downright steals.  Remember Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder's Christmas Carol?  Catherine Tate taking flipping liberties with the tale in Nan's Christmas Carol?  Michael Gambon playing the Ebenezer-figure against Matt Smith in the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special?  Remember Michael Caine in the Muppet film?  

Ebenezer Scrooge by another name, on another planet.  It's universal, you see.

The list is endless.  The Flintstones, the Jetsons, Scrooge McDuck, Looney Toons, the Smurfs, Bill Murray in Scrooged…  Everyone who can has jumped on Ebenezer's bandwagon.  Everyone has a version.  It's because that story - repentance, change, hope - is so ingrained, so rooted in us all.  We all know that we need to change (and if you don't know it, be careful!  That means you're almost at a stage of not being able to change!).  Ebenezer shows us that we can.

It's not often I take John Lennon very seriously, but that question of his:

"What have you done?"

seems quite apposite for 2015.  Many of my friends and I have been through enough to make us very angry indeed, very indignant.  The key is how we will use that anger for good, rather than let it either fester into bitterness or be swept under the carpet and come back to bite us as depression.

One day God will ask me what I did with all that anger and indignation.  I'm working on an answer.

And if this Christmas there are some severe scorings out of names on your Christmas card list, you may well ask, "What have we done?"  If your country has just elected quite a weight of far-right politicians to power, it might well ask, "What have we done?"  If you find yourself on Christmas Eve knowing that you've hurt someone and not made any move to mend it, you may well need to ask, "What have I done?"

Bearing in mind, honestly, what we've done, what do we need to do next?  What could we mend and how could we do it?  Ebenezer was probably beset with shame on Christmas Day, and could well have succumbed to the temptation to go and hide under a stone for the rest of his life.  But to his eternal credit he first of all sent out a peace offering in the shape of a turkey and then went out himself to mend relationships.  Sent and went, that's Ebenezer.  I have to say, he's a more honest human being than many.  I think that's why I insist on calling him Ebenezer rather than Scrooge.  The stone of hope rather than the miser. 

What have you done?  And what do you need to do next?