The Ghost of Christmas Multiverse

Author's Note: Thursdays for the next couple of weeks will be major holidays and so I will not be sending anything new until after the New Year. 

So it is with gratitude both for your dedication as regular receivers of this blog, and your comments in email and in person, that I wish you a warm and peaceful Yule and a Happy New Year.

See you Thursdays after the holidays!

Ebenezer Scrooge awoke on Christmas morning to find himself a new human, having faced his past, his present, and then looked fearfully into the yawning maw of his future. His experience awoke within him a sense of the importance of things beyond money and gain. He made his amends and started anew. It is a lesson we could all use, daily, not just yearly. Of the many uplifting Christmas tales, this is the one we are all familiar with at some level, even today, and it resounds with a potency that reaches even the hardest hearts.

Recently, though, I found myself contemplating a possibility beyond Dickens’ three time frames of past, present, and future. What if another spirit arrived and brought Scrooge, not through time, but through the foam of possible realities? It is fascinating to consider, especially from the modern realm of scientific theories regarding the fabric of reality. This is not to divest Dickens of all of his cleverness and moral potency. Using his three spirits, he managed to write possibly the first science fiction story involving time travel. He even anticipated some of the main rules of the genre that are often adopted in modern time fiction. He can perhaps be forgiven for being limited to a literary understanding, but we are not, as science and fiction together have built upon his formidable foundation and provided us with libraries full of speculative writing about traveling through time.

Modern science has postulated the quantum many-worlds theory, where every quantum event with multiple possible events has all those outcomes realized as different probable worlds. For every Frostian “road less traveled” there is a reality where the road was also not taken, and there, reality splits into the two possibilities. Thus, there is a reality where I write this essay and another where I write a different essay, and both of those realities are realized in a branching timeline of universal waveforms. For each choice, each possible outcome any (and all) of us makes, another universe, just like ours, but a little different, pops into existence. Thus, the foam of uncountable possible realities fluffs out like soap bubbles in the Thanksgiving casserole dish. We are unaware of these other realities, and we cannot travel through them on our own, though we can ponder the consequences of other decisions easily enough.

Thus, rather than traveling through time (or visiting the times that each ghost is master of), it is possible for there to be another, somewhat nerdier ghost, who saves time (perhaps literally) by taking Ebenezer through possible realities.Therefore, I invented another spirit—the Ghost of Christmas Multiverse—in honor of Dickens and physics. This interdimensional specter alleviates the necessity for the other spirits, as it merely shows him the infinite possibilities of his choices had he been fortunate enough to make different ones. Scrooge can then see what his life could, is, and will have been like without the need for all the dawdling. The resulting spectral experience is no less life-changing, and the final change is not diminished in the slightest.

As Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley, he is told that he will be escorted by one spirit through all the many choices of his life. Scrooge hesitates and then lies down to await this visitor in the night. When the spirit arrives, it isn’t a ghost but someone who resembles Dr. Richard Feynman, but glowing like Obi-Wan Kenobi. This spectral physics master takes Ebenezer’s bony claw and, waving something that looks remarkably like a pocket calculator, opens a portal through reality.

As a lad, we are told that Scrooge was abandoned by his family on the Christmas holidays, forced to stay at school, because his father blamed the lad for the death of his mother in childbirth. The Ghost of Christmas Multiverse shows Ebenezer what might have happened if his mother did not die. He also shows him what happens if his sister also survived Fred’s birth. Maybe he is shown how, rather than leaving the employ of Mr. Fezziwig, Scrooge stays on and eventually inherits the business, marries one of Fezziwig’s daughters, and has a large and rollicking brood.Rather than growing cynical and fearful of death, Ebenezer grows to contemplate just how fortunate he has been despite the challenges and trials of his life. He and Jacob Marley become friends, but it is a friendship of deep trust, loyalty, and affection.

Later, Scrooge is shown with himself and the woman he loves, but when she comes to rebuke his lust for gold, rather than doubling down, as we see him do in the book, he demurs and repents his greed, choosing love instead, and goes on to great happiness and is redeemed by the love and faith of an adoring wife.Instead of the Ghost of Christmas Present showing Scrooge all of the people, poor and wealthy, great and small, celebrating the holiday, and then landing at the Cratchits’ home, Multiverse brings Scrooge through other Londons. In one, Christmas is forbidden by a mad, puritanical ruler; in another, Christmas is celebrated the whole year literally.

Then, diving in to show other variations of Bob Cratchit and his family, there is one universe in which Bob is a drunkard and a domestic tyrant and another in which he dies of disease, leaving Mrs. Cratchit and young Peter to fend for the family. Perhaps most painfully, there is one reality in which Mrs. Cratchit dies in childbirth with Tiny Tim, and rather than adoring his young, frail boy, Bob blames and loathes the child and sends him off to school and abandons him. That might pluck the old miser’s heartstrings a bit, eh?Later, at Fred’s, we find that rather than a cheery and upbeat young man devoted to his wife, Scrooge’s nephew has inherited that miserly grasping nature, and is living a life not of love and joy, but of wretched penny-pinching, mistreating all who cross him. Like his uncle before him, Fred is given the chance to choose love, but chooses rather the master passion of gain. How much pain might it cause Ebenezer to see that his one real relation is turning out to be no different than himself?

Finally, stepping in for the gaunt and dreadful Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, Multiverse shows Scrooge many variants of the future beyond his death. Instead of his grave, Scrooge beholds himself, but not in his customary black, but brightly dressed with Tiny Tim, now thriving, perched on his shoulder. Perhaps, instead of Mrs. Dilber, the charwoman, and the undertaker seeking to make themselves a pittance on the items stolen from his deathbed, Scrooge is witness to himself as a kind and benevolent master, doling out gold pieces as gifts, and thoughtfully rendering kindnesses the value of which cannot be measured against the pound sterling.

How could such visions fail to move Scrooge if he sees the best versions of himself? Or, what if, by some strange and loathsome set of choices, Scrooge runs for parliament and, in the House of Commons, creates legislation to enact his antithetical ideologies about the destitute? Scrooge, seeing himself as the worst possible monster, persecuting those with less as the ultimate end of his current miserly fetishes, might repent his ways in horror.

If you think that I have gone around the bend a bit, rendering a nearly perfect classic into a scientific mish mash, then I beg you to watch the myriad cinematic versions of the fable this year. Each, in its own way, occupies a slightly nudged variation of the original theme from the book. Although true to the spirit (there’s that word again) of Dickens’ tale, each version is a slightly dislodged example of the whole. True, no film can ever capture the beauty of the novella. Dickens had a way with words and a scalpel-like wit for pointing out the best and worst of humanity in his era. To capture that skill would be to attempt the impossible, but I maintain that each movie is, in a way, a kind of quantum many-worlds view of the book.Take, for instance, my favorite of all the Christmas Carol versions, the 1951 classic with the miser played by Alistair Sim. In this fantastically dark tale, Scrooge doesn’t just leave his apprenticeship with Fezziwig, he buys the business with Jacob Marley and puts Fezziwig on the street. Ebenezer’s sister, “Fan,” died in childbirth with Fred, but because of his passionate resentment at her loss, he misses her plea to take care of her son before she expires in a heartwrenching scene that gives emotional depth to Ebenezer.

Although the film takes special care to cover all of the most important parts of Scrooge’s “reclamation,” it is nevertheless necessary to make the story a little more logical to the audiences who watched it, over a century after the book was published in 1843. As such, things at which Dickens merely hints are drawn out in clear, stark lines, and although it is not a horror per se, the film gives a most Gothic performance of the story and captures the sardonic, cruel-hearted Scrooge mirrored against his nearly mad, joyful, childlike redemption at the end. The movie feels haunted, as if the emotions within Scrooge dampen and blur the experience, which adds to the grim but delightfully terrifying portrayal.

The other of my favorites, a made-for-TV film starring George C. Scott, from 1984, skips over much and also makes up much. Whereas there is never a mention of Scrooge’s lost love interest in the previous film after they split, the screenwriters go to great lengths to show that she went on to be happy after leaving Ebenezer. Both show the children beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present, but the latter gives a much less threatening promise about them.

There is a heartier, robust performance of the lad Tiny Tim and added dialog and depth to the Cratchits, while not getting their family numbers right as in the book. Scott’s Scrooge is also a more grounded, naturalistic character, and the particular London makes the viewer feel like you’re in a Victorian painting, where ghosts just happen to be part of the scenery.

The very farthest, nearly unwatchable version of the beloved tale is the 1999 TV movie, with Sir Patrick Stewart playing Scrooge. The whole thing feels flat and overacted, with large parts getting skipped over, relying on the audience’s familiarity with the story, perhaps, to cover a multitude of evils perpetrated against the story. Of all the versions, this is the one that feels less like a Christmas movie and more like a TV commercial or parody. Even so, it seems to have the benefit of fitting in the multiverse reality, where multiple Scrooges all eventually make it through to a redeeming end.

The final reality is a now often maligned film, when not forgotten, the 1970 musical Scrooge, starring Albert Finney and Sir Alec Guinness (yes, that Alec Guinness), where each scene is punctuated by a very good and lovable song. One assumes that there is a universe in which we all break into song like a Disney princess after every few lines of spoken dialogue. This, if you can find it, is a worthy watch, even just for the novelty of it.

Finally, I think it would be fun if, as part of his journey, Scrooge was brought by Multiverse, through a sideslip where all the versions of his tale are shown, whether badly acted school plays or church sketches, or just any or all of the films, cartoons, and commercials ever made, to show Ebenezer how his transformation still resounds with all of us, even today, getting on to 200 years later.

If nothing else, I think he’s earned it. And if we have to live in any universe at all, then I’m glad it’s the one with A Christmas Carol in it.