A NEW TWIST ON AN OLD CHRISTMAS CAROL

Don’t you just love Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol? I think it has a timeless quality that applies to the present as much as to when it was first written. I have personalized the story to Tracy, a ten-year-old girl whose family is going through some quite contemporary hard times. Her mother has been dead a year, leaving her father, Johnny, to care for Tracy and her seven-year-old sister, Angelina. All three of them are spending Christmas Eve in a shelter, after Johnny lost his job, and they were evicted from their apartment. However, he hasn’t forgotten to take the things that really matter─his painting, poetry, laptop computer, and 15-year-old Kitty Tinkerbell (slipped in through the shelter’s back fire escape). Their hopes and dreams seem dead as a doornail. Like Charles Dickens, I also don’t know what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. However, the magic that invades and transforms Tracy’s and her family’s dreary circumstances is found in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or my story’s done for. Merry Christmas!