{"id":7527,"date":"2013-12-17T13:54:38","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T18:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=7527"},"modified":"2013-12-18T03:32:20","modified_gmt":"2013-12-18T08:32:20","slug":"tis-that-christmas-story-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/7527","title":{"rendered":"‘Tis That Christmas Story Season…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well…there’s a baby in the manger one, which a lot of good people still hold dear. \u00a0 I have a different one in mind. \u00a0 This just came across my Facebook stream…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

17 December 1843 A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, was published.<\/em><\/p>\n

I saw it and immediately thought the artist had captured both Scrooge and the entire Dickens story perfectly. \u00a0 This is one of the better representations of Scrooge I’ve ever seen, and you see a lot of them this time of year. Most of the time what you get is a caricature, an easy to dismiss stereotype. I hear the 1938 movie version with Reginald Owen is well liked, but the first serious telling of the story I ever saw was the George C. Scott version and I still find that the better one. In it, Scrooge is a business man of his day and age and when he says the poor had better die soon and decrease the surplus population you feel it as Dickens meant it to be felt, that this is a man who is probably very good at business, but has lost his soul.<\/p>\n

There’s the old story of the birth of Jesus. \u00a0 There’s other’s like Amahl and the Night Visitors<\/em>, also a favorite of mine once upon a time. \u00a0 There’s It’s A Wonderful Life<\/em>. \u00a0 But for me the meaning of the season is best seen in A Christmas Carol<\/em>. \u00a0 You just have to get past all the cardboard Scrooges. \u00a0 If I were doing a film version of it today, I’d make him an American financier, and change not a word of dialogue or action, and it would make you cringe for the soul of this man.<\/p>\n

[Update…<\/em>] \u00a0It was the Alastair Sim version I was thinking of, as the first of the believable Scrooges, not the MGM Reginald Owen one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well…there’s a baby in the manger one, which a lot of good people still hold dear. \u00a0 I have a different one in mind. \u00a0 This just came across my Facebook stream… 17 December 1843 A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, was published. I saw it and immediately thought the artist had captured both Scrooge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[99],"class_list":["post-7527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-the-human-status"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}