If A Christmas Carol had been written by someone else

The title an homage to what I think is the record holder LOTR thread, though I doubt (and I hope) this will have 1% of that one’s hits and posts, but— you all know the story. How would other writers have told it?

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, or, Nails Done While You Wait!
by Kurt Vonnegut

Ebenezer Scrooge has become unstuck in time through the aid of three ghosts. Not that the ghosts are exactly ghosts.

Scrooge was partners with Jacob Marley in an investment firm.

When I first began earning ‘go to hell money’ investment firms wanted to take me to dinner all the time. I went because it was a nice way to get a nice meal in a nice restaurant on somebody else’s dime. I felt like a high class call girl who didn’t put out. I never paid for a high class call girl. Consequently I never had sex with one either.

Scrooge & Marley were two of the most successful men in their business. They did not, as LBJ would say, share the wealth. LBJ shared wealth with brown people in a country called Vietnam. Most of the troops he sent to share the wealth were black. The color of the wealth was orange. It was called napalm. It burned the brown skins off of the people. Strangely it was beautiful. Orange is a beautiful color. Frank Sinatra had an orange living room and an orange plane and always wore an orange handkerchief. He had white skin, though really white skin has orange in it.

Scrooge’s employee was named Bob Cratchit. Bob is basically an accountant. Scrooge does not treat him well. Bob is often cold in that office because on what Scrooge paid him he did not have a coat that kept out the cold and could not afford a fire in his office. Bob had many more children than most would say he could afford. So did I for most of my life. Six of them. Three of them are my nephews. We were always broke.

Until the kids left home, then I suddenly got rich and became a high class call girl for investment firms, minus the sex.

I was in Scrooge’s bedroom when the Ghost of Christmas Past came to him. The Ghost of Christmas Past said “take my robe” and soon he was in a Christmas long forgotten in his youth. I grabbed her robe too, figuring that I should come along for the ride since I’m the author.

Scrooge wound up in a small schoolhouse in England. England is an island, a cold and wet island with castles right out of a fairy tale and people with very white skin. I prefer tropical islands where the people have brown and black skins even though I have white skin. England preferred them too so they made weapons and took over the islands and sent white skinned people there. They also sent black skinned people to America to replace the brown skinned people on plantations.

When I grabbed the the Ghost Christmas Past’s robe I didn’t go back to England in the Victorian era but to a Christmas of my own past. My Christmas was in a place called Germany where I was a prisoner. My mother had just killed herself at the time. Maybe she would not have if she’d been on an island.

Scrooge will learn what his life was is and will be from the Ghosts. He will become a second father to Tiny Tim and give Bob Cratchit wonderful presents and more pay and responsibility. Bob Cratchit will eventually become a very rich man himself and his son Tiny Tim will not die because Scrooge will provide medical care.

The reason Bob Cratchit will become very rich is because he has been embezzling from Scrooge for years. Within seven years he will have all of Scrooge’s fortune and Ebenezer, who by then will be the nicest man in London, will be indigent. The only reason Ebenezer will not be living in a workhouse while Bob indulges increasingly bizarre and expensive tastes in illicit women and larger houses with Ebenezer’s former fortune is because he will be taken to live with a homosexual couple.

One half of the homosexual couple is London’s most successful manicurist and hair stylist, Timoteo. He is Bob Cratchit’s crippled son. When Bob learns he is gay Bob will disown Tim who will change his name to Timoteo and move in with a brown person named Ravi from a village Bob will have destroyed to make rubber so he can become richer and give his new 18 year old mistress a bracelet. The mistress will give Bob sex. Bob will wear a condom which in my day when I was in Germany as a prisoner was called a rubber. All of the labor of the enslaved brown people will be so a man on an island that is cold and wet can have sex with a young girl. So it goes.

But let me start with Jacob Marley’s Ghost coming to see Scrooge. Unlike the other ghosts, he really was a person when he was alive. I don’t know who Casper the Friendly Ghost was, but my guess is he was one of the Wise Men. I don’t know what became of his friends Melchior and Balthazar.

The Spectre Natale by Anne Rice

“You shall thrice be visited this e’en by spirits, who for thousands of years have awaited thy coming, my old lover…” Jacob’s form, emaciated, gaunt, yet hauntingly erotic, envoiced in the aeoleon tones of his former tenor.

Ebenezer heard Jacob’s words but did not perceive them, for his true fixation was not auditory but visual. He was far more enraptured by Jacob’s lips, succulent even in death, perhaps more so. The rest of Jacob’s face and countenance was white as snow, but it worked wonderfully. The last time he had seen him he had been pale like Ebenezer, but not as aethereally white as now, his lips the only red about him, and longed to touch that skin that was alabasterian not just in its glow but in its cold hard feel. He longed to drink that Milk of Human Kindness once more from Jacob’s pricked thumb, which as he feasted upon it in the back of his throat reminded him of that summer when he and Jacob had met at the East Buggerford Boy’s School, on that night when they wore nothing but each other and the mosquito netting in the tropical heat of Scotland…

“Take me Jacob!” cried Ebenezer. “Take me on this journey through the æther of time and space! And talk to me of the gradations of human uncaring and iniquity while you do it!”

The Eban Haazer Code by Dan Brown

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge, which has as you know its roots in the pagan observance of the Winter Solstice that reached its apex under the Saturnalia of Rome, though Mithraic lore eventually became even more essential, until of course Pope Gregory declared instead this most pagan of holidays the basis of the Feast of the Nativity, or a Mass of the birth of Christ, hence, Christmas, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some small provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries, hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, though arguably less so than a century before due to the general gradual cheapening of manufactured items consequent to the industrialization begun in the mid 18th century that reached its climax in the mid 19th and made goods of all kinds affordable but in so doing ironically impoverished the majority of the nation by making them virtual serfs again, this time to the mercantilist rather than landed gentry classes.”

“Are there no prisons? And workhouses?” asked Ebenezer, his eyes narrowing and his name deriving from the Hebrew eban-Haazer meaning “Stone of Help”. “The treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor?”

“They are still” said the gentleman. “I wish I could say they are not, but under the Act for the Better Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom established by His Majesty King Charles II, who had many illegitimate children and was forced to agree to humiliating oaths of obedience to the Presbyterian church before being crowned in Scotland shortly after the beheading of his father Charles I by the Puritan government of Cromwell, they became particularly widespread, though even by the time of the passage of the act similar operations had been in operation in Abingdon for a generation” he said taking a seat.

**Eben Garry Eben Nezer ** by David Mamet

“You want Christmas off? FUCK YOU, that’s your Christmas off! And if I hear one more word about your weepy little crippled kid, I will personally fuck you up, you creepy little faggot!”


Credits in Black, Debits in Red by Lou Dobbs

A few weeks after New Year’s, old Scrooge got several bills in the mail. You might say he got a visit from the Ghost of Fiscal Responsibility.

A Christmas Carol, by Ayn Rand:
“Get the hell out of my way, spirits!”

A Darkness on Christmas Eve by Simon Green : "

The spirit rose up before him, tall and terrible. “Hello, Ebenezer. It’s me, Jacob Marley, your old partner. I’ve been sent back to this world to convince you to change your ways. If you don’t - I’ll do to you all the awful things that I’ve learned how to do since I died. And if you do; well, I’ll probably do them to you anyway. I wasn’t a very nice man when I was alive, and death seldom improves things.”

How the Scrooge Stole Cratchit’s Christmas! by Dr. Seuss

Every Cratchit in England liked Christmas a lot…
But the Scrooge- he’s the boss of Bob Cratchit- did NOT!
The Scrooge hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be, perhaps, that his hat was too tight.
It could be his clothes didn’t fit him just right.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
Was the fact that he was a miserly man who cared for no one but himself, and had bad experiences with Christmas in the past. Either that, or his heart was two sizes too small.

Scrooge, the Family Guy by Seth McFarlane et al

PETER SCROOGE: Bah freakin’ humbug! I hate Christmas! Carolers out on the street, charities asking for dough, and the same tired old Christmas specials which show the prejudices of when they were made!
[CUT TO: A parody of the 1964 Rudolph special. Donner and his wife are taken aback by their newborn son’s bright red nose.]
DONNER: His beak blinks like a blinkin’ beaker! He’ll be shunned by modern society for his uniqueness. I can’t let that happen! [scrapes mud off the floor and slaps it onto Rudolph’s nose. Enter SANTA]
RUDOLPH: Santa! [mud falls off nose]
DONNER: Do you think my boy can be one of your reindeer someday?
SANTA: I don’t see how that bright red nose of his could be of any help. [sighs] Every year, it’s the same question- [mocking falsetto] “Can my kid be one of your reindeer?” Look, do you know how many times I get asked that? I’ve had it up to here [raises arm to the level of a Nazi salute] with that question!
[Donner and his wife look on with a shocked, confused stare]
SANTA: What? [notices his own arm] Oh.
LOIS CRATCHIT: Peter, could I have Christmas off?
PETER SCROOGE: [sighs] Look, Lois. You’re my only employee…I…I mean, what if you were to get hurt or killed or something? Or knocked up? Unwanted pregnancies and Christmas are two things that do not go together.
LOIS CRATCHIT: But my son…
PETER SCROOGE: Look, if you like your son so much, and if you’re so intent on taking the day off, why don’t you have him fill in for you?
[cut to STEWIE CRATCHIT at his mother’s desk]
STEWIE CRATCHIT: Mark my words, once I get rid of that trollop who brought me into this world, that moneygrubber is next to go.
PETER SCROOGE: I’ve been working too long. Time for a jump in my money pool…holy crap, it’s a ghost! [to himself] Okay, okay. Now calm down. You’ve seen a lot of movies. You know what to do when you see a ghost.
[CUT TO: A parody of Ghost. As Unchained Melody plays, MARLEY’S GHOST begins to make a clay pot as PETER SCROOGE caresses him]

Old Man Scrooge had lived in the dark, boarded-up house for as lomng as anyone could recall. He lived in only the top suite of rooms, but from time to time passers-by reported strange noises coming from the locked rooms beneath. Some reported to have heard the rattling of chains, while others spoke of the loud cacophony of noises reminiscent of a coach-and-four being driven up the stairs. Others voiced dark suspicions that a ramp had been installed, and whole ruminants driven to assuage the appetites of whatever was within.

Late at night, strange lights of a squamous color were seen through the open windows of Scrooge’s habitation, and he could be overheard expostulating as if arguing with other persons although no one had been seen to enter. “Leave me alone!” was one phrase he is supposed to have cried. “The Spirits! The Spirits have done it!” another reported. But none dared approach, because the knockers on Scrooge’s door seemed to change eerily as one approached.
Matters came to a head on that Solstice evening, when loud noises and strange lights issued from the house, and Scrooge cried louder than before, and ultimately ran mad from the house, wild-eyed and screaming at everyone in the streets. All agreed that he was a changed man, and it was said that whatever had happened in that room had driven him insane.
—H.P. Lovecraft’s Ghosts in the Walls

A Christmas Corralle, by P.J. O’Rourke

Ebenezer Scrooge embodied capitalism. His heart coursed with high-grade Iraqi oil. His skin was sewn together from the portfolios of CEOs he took over in hostile manners. His bones were surgicaly constituted with the poached ivory from herds of Serengheti Elephants. He drank wine distilled from crushed liberal democrats.

So when his office manager Bob Cratchitt asked for Christmas Eve off, it was like asking Scrooge if he would like to be hooked up to second-hand dialysis machines the rest of his life.

Scrooge said no, and Cratchitt fell to his feet, crying a Delta marsh full of crocodile tears. What followed was a litany of bleeding heart soliloquy, starting with a starving, anemic wife with a body that would make Sarah Michelle Gellar jealous, progressing to caring for a million squawling brats, and ending with a youngest son twisted into a pretzel by the onset of osteoporosis. Scrooge effectively told him to save the drama for his mama and make sure his ass was behind that desk tomorrow.

That night, Scrooge went to bad after ordering the quashing of a few third world economies, and suddenly the lights came back on. Ready to scream at the household help for wasting electricity, Scrooger instead saw a transparant guy wearing chains, claiming to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. GCP rattled the chains while talking in a creaking voice, taking Scrooge on an involuntary ride through Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

To add to the chintzy special effects, the ghost opened up a cannister of dry ice and told Scrooge it was now 50 years ago, and showed him how other kids were playing with dangerous lead toys while Scrooge was flipping beads on an abacus and charging fees to smaller kids for breathing his air. The ghost somehow intended for Scrooge to feel bad about this.

The another ghost stepped in, opened another cannister of dry ice, and showed Scrooge the Cratchitt household, with Mrs. Cratchitt serving Bob and his 12 kids filet mignon steaks pruchased with this week’s welfare handouts. Tiny Tim hobbled around on a crutch, crude but convincing enough to fool the government into lining the pockets of the Cratchitts further with “It Takes a Village” money. Bob himself bitched constantly about having to work Christmas Eve, but at least would be able to pass the time by playing Halo 3 on his Blackberry. When Scrooge started complaining to the ghost about where his tax money was going, a new ghost with a hoodie and Stalin-era sickle stepped in.

This one showed him a graveyard where Scrooge’s funeral was taking place, and the only people there were the priest and couple of illegal immigrant grave diggers. Bob Cratchitt was too busy investing his newly-acquired 51% share holdings into IWhore Doll stock to attend. Turns out Tiny Tim’s grave was nearby too, the chraming tyke having been involved in a drug war with so many Colombian cocaine lords armed with Uzis, his bullet-ridden body came out looking like Hilary Clinton’s door mat.

This got to Scrooge all right. He realized what a wasted, futile life he was leading. When he woke up, he arranged to have Hailburton merge with his business, and all he had to do from that point on was attend board meetings and sip Mai Tais while Korean slave girls shipped from Japan massaged his shoulders and serviced him from underneath the mahogany meeting tables.

A sharp rattle of iron chains deadened and died away, and clouds of soot and fog drifted outside the windows. Ebenezer Scrooge gazed across the narrow lane with haunted and troubled eyes. Marley had just left him, and it was his message that held him frightened and almost sad, awaiting the spirits who were coming to attack his right to save a little coin. He wondered if the cheer and merriment that had lately overcome the grim city of his birth was to involve him. And then he sighed, remembering that his partner had founded this meanest holding company in southern London and that he had left it to him. He owned all the building and many of the businesses. Scrooge and Marley was his, and the Scrivener building, with its thousands of desks, and the cheapest heating of the age. To him belonged Bob Cratchit, the assistant who gave toil
and sweat to the business and made a living possible on that cold gray grimy street. He could not escape being involved by whatever befell London.

Scrooge prayed that the tranquillity and sameness of his life would not be permanently disrupted. He meant to get so much more from his business than he had done. He
wanted the dreary quiet days to last always. Visits from dead partners and elemental spirits would make him unhappy. He was a skeptic born, and and already convincing himelf there would be no visits. He wished only to go on doing business and saving money. And he thought of what that drafty office meant to him. He hated it all—the rattle of papers, the stench of ink, the unpainted walls, and the hordes of shaggy, dusty clerks and workmen, the sleek, heavy-limbed, blue-blooded peers, and the browsing herds of shoppers and the lean, consumption-pale beggars of the street.



**e e cummings**

Ebineezer's

hallucinating

who told carolers
	
	to piss off with a holly-sprig 	

			dagger

got scared with onetwothreefour ghostsinhisface	

                                                       Tim on a crutch


he was an bent old bastard

			glurgehatingangel, but

how do you like your merry weenie now

Jacob Marley?

The Middle of the Winter - Robert Jordan

The Long Day - Robert Jordan

The Financier Unflinching - Robert Jordan

The Darkness Creeping - Robert Jordan

The Frosts of London - Robert Jordan

Spirit of Yesteryear - Robert Jordan

An Aura of Vice - Robert Jordan

The Road of Repentance - Robert Jordan

Stinginess’ Heart - Robert Jordan

Roundabout of Eventide - Robert Jordan

Sight of Dooms - Robert Jordan

A Turn from Perdition - Robert Jordan
Yes, some of these are a bit of a stretch, but I tried to make them fit both the pattern of his titles and the progression of the story. Work with me here.

Love it!!!

MARCELLUS SCROOGE: I think you’re gonna find, when all this shit is over, this Christmas humbug…I think you’re gonna find yourself one smiling motherfucker. Thing is, Butch, right now, we got business to do, and painful as it may be, business don’t stop just because it’s Christmas. Now that’s a hard motherfucking fact of life, but it’s a fact of life your ass is going to have to get realistic about.

See, this business is filled with unrealistic motherfuckers, motherfuckers who think their ass is going to spend Christmas at home with their families. If you mean they get fired, they do. If you mean they get time off, they don’t.

'Sides, Butch, what you got at home anyway. Two kids? Three? You ain’t never gonna be the boss, Butch, and if you was gonna make it, you’da made it.

(holds out pittance of coins) You my nigga?

BUTCH CRATCHIT: (hesitates before taking money) It certainly appears so.

MARCELLUS SCROOGE: Now when you’re working on Christmas, you might feel a slight sting. That’s pride, fucking with you. FUCK pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps. 'Cause a year from now, when you’ve made me a bunch more money, you’re gonna say, Marcellus Scrooge was right.

BUTCH CRATCHIT: I have no problem with that, Mr. Scrooge.

MARCELLUS SCROOGE: On Christmas Day, your ass is here at work. Say it.

BUTCH CRATCHIT: On Christmas Day my ass is here at work.

a Heroes Christmas

Ghost of Christmas Past/Present/Future (Hiro Nakamura): I have shown you the things that were, are, and will be.

Ebenezer Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia): Like… whoa.

(The scene is saved in that Petrelli is only wearing his boxers throughtout.)

Tyler Perry’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL starring Tyler Perry and written by Tyler Perry
Madea Scrooge (played by Tyler Perry): Oh no wacky wacky that’s my 2nd grade teacher Ms Marsden and there’s that little kid used to pull my hair. I’m bigger now… come here 7 year old me, let’s tag team and beat the hell out of him…

Ghost of Christmas Past (played by Tyler Perry): There’s no reason to speak to them. They are ghosts. They can neither see nor hear you.

Madea: I bet they can see or hear this! (pulls a .42 and opens fire- the children scream and run)

Madea: Tell me haint, is that crackbaby gonna live?

Ghost of Christmas Present (played by Tyler Perry): I see a Tickle Me Elmo without an owner well preserved sentimentally.

Madea: Okay just checkin’.

Ghost of Christmas Present: Because you know folks, crack is a huge problem to our people, and its effects on the unborn are perhaps the most devastating toll it takes. [he looks poignantly and silently into the camera to make sure the audience gets the point, then walks away as melodramatic sad music plays].

:confused: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid??? :confused:

Pulp Fiction

:smack:

The Scrooge Files
by Chris Carter

“Spirits, begone!” said Scrooge, his voice quavering. He pulled his blanket up to his chin and pointed a bony finger at the two well-dressed figures. “You have no business here!”

“It’s all right, sir,” FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder said placatingly. He holstered his 9mm and pointed his penlight away from the old man. “Deputy Director Skinner sent us to investigate the paranormal phenomenon you reported. We’re here to help.”

Scrooge moaned in fear and burrowed deeper under the threadbare covers.

“Come on, Mulder,” Dana Scully muttered, shining her penlight around the drafty bedchamber. “There aren’t any spirits here. This poor old guy is clearly deluded.”

“Maybe, Scully, but maybe not. Think about it. Three different ghosts, all on the same night? It’s huge.” He smiled. “This could be the biggest thing since the Toledo manifestations of 1967, or the Dusseldorf poltergeists of '83.”

Scully rolled her eyes. “Or the Mulder delusion of '07. Come on, it’s Christmas Eve! I can think of a million things I’d rather be doing than this right now.”

“Don’t let thoughts of holiday merriment distract you from maybe the biggest case of our careers, Scully.” Scrooge moaned again, and Mulder gestured to the bed. “I’m telling you, the truth is in here…”

SCROOGE by the bard

SCROOGE: By mine withered eye Is it Marley I see? Appirition what doth thou needst with me?

MARLEY: Avenge me my partner!

SCROOGE: Vengence? Fie, what is it that thou needest vengence for? You who hath made duccets by day in twenty score?

MARLEY: Duccets?!? What use is your worldly money to me, when my life be ended by thy own vassel Cratchit! Avenge me upon the scurvy knave and with holly stake him down lest the stakes be too dear.

SCROOGE: Stakes or steaks what mean they to me? Tis rancid beef all the same! That which clouds the eyes and turns humours to ill. Be gone appirition if that be your will.

MARLEY: Beef barely or bread matters not in this matter, tis time to strike Cratchit dead in his wake. Strike now while the iron is hot and strike hard you shall lest Christmas pass without Cratchit’s death and his boy.

SCROOGE by the bard

SCROOGE: By mine withered eye Is it Marley I see? Appirition what doth thou needst with me?

MARLEY: Avenge me my partner!

SCROOGE: Vengence? Fie, what is it that thou needest vengence for? You who hath made duccets by day in twenty score?

MARLEY: Duccets?!? What use is your worldly money to me, when my life be ended by thy own vassel Cratchit! Avenge me upon the scurvy knave and with holly stake him down lest the stakes be too dear.

SCROOGE: Stakes or steaks what mean they to me? Tis rancid beef all the same! That which clouds the eyes and turns humours to ill. Be gone appirition if that be your will.

MARLEY: Beef barely or bread matters not in this matter, tis time to strike Cratchit dead in his wake. Strike now while the iron is hot and strike hard you shall lest Christmas pass without Cratchit’s death and add to that his lame boy.

SCROOGE: By Fury by Wrath so shall it be. Vengence for you and lame boy pie for me!!