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.