The Christmas Bookshelf

Christmas, like every other time of the year, was marked by books. Various books made up favorite Christmastime reading, and flat, rectangular packages were stacked neatly under the Christmas tree. Indeed, if there was a year in which more than half the family presents exchanged were not books, I cannot recall it.

And so, of course, this time of year reminds me of all sorts of favorite books. Here are a few of those rooted most deeply in this season for me.

The feast of St. Nicholas, with the putting out of our shoes in hopes of chocolate coins, always seemed to start the Christmas season in earnest for us children, since as on Christmas we woke early in expectation of candy. And, of course, St. Nicholas is the distant ancestor of our bowdlerized Santa Claus. St. Nicholas himself is, of course, a far more interesting character. A real person (who among other things once popped bishop Arius a good one) St. Nicholas is also one of the saints around whom a robust mythology sprang up, and The Twenty Miracles of Saint Nicolas by Bernarda Bryson is a simply outstanding retelling of many of the most famous myths about him, from the three dowerless maidens and the three boys in the salting tub to my personal favorite "How Saint Nichold Met and Overcame the Goddess Diana".

The next feast day in December which normally hit our radar was Our Lady of Guadalupe, and for me the Tomie dePaola The Lady of Guadalupe will always be the definitive version. Indeed, when I read it to my own children, I find myself falling into the cadences of my mother's voice, which is the voice which in my mind's ear I will always here it in.

Some might see it as a "girl book", but I much enjoyed hearing and reading The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden as a child, and I have since found a copy so that I can read it to my own passel of daughters. A story about wishes and dolls is something to stir any girl's heart, and one or two of mine are generally sniffing by the end, while the stories of a six-year-old orphan and an aging childless couple are enough to play on parental heart strings. And Rumer Godden writes this short story with the same skill as in her adult novels.

I can't say why this book stuck with me. I recall the day my father stumbled across it in a bookstore and was charmed enough to pick it up. As the oldest, I was no longer in the prime audience for a picture book, being 13 or so at the time. But A Christmas Card for Mr. McFizz by Obren Bokich, is quietly charming. A couple years ago, at this time of year, it bubbled up in my memory and would not go away again until I bought a copy to read to my children.

High Spirits is collection of short stories, based on the ghost stories which Robertson Davies would tell the faculty and students of Massey College each Christmas. They are humorous ghost stories, and in some cases of varying quality. But those which are good are very, very good. Look especially for "The Cat That Went to Trinity", "The Ghost That Vanished By Degrees" and "The Kiss of Khrushchev". While I hear The Lady of Guadalupe in my mother's voice, I can't read these stories aloud without falling into my father's voice.

And, of course, how could any list of Christmas reading be complete without A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I try to read it every year. And, of course, I also always re-watch the outstanding George C. Scott movie adaptation.

The Economics of Scrooge

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is among my favorite stories. This year, I've been reading it aloud to the family for the first time. (I started off reading it to the girls, but MrsDarwin has proved a more apt audience. Dickens' prose remains a bit beyond 5 and 6-year-old tastes.)

I'm far from being alone in my affection for A Christmas Carol, and so there are any number of movie adaptations available as well. This particular year, it happens that I saw two versions, the George C. Scott adaptation which is an absolutely superb film, and also The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine.

A number of comparisons might spring to mind when watching two such different treatments a few days apart, but in this case what struck me immediately was the way in which each movie attempted to convey the heartlessness of Scrooge's business methods.

Dickens himself is rather sketchy about what exactly Scrooge's business is, other than that it consumes all his attention. Scrooge sits in a counting house through the day, and in the outer office Bob Cratchit is seen copying letters -- a clerical task generic enough it could pertain to any business. It's also mentioned that Scrooge makes short term loans or securities on the Exchange. Or at least, that is how I take the line:
This was a great relief, because ``three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,'' and so forth, would have become a mere United States' security if there were no days to count by.

Doubtless merchant financing and options trading seemed far too complex for a children's movie, so in the Muppet Christmas Carol, Scrooge has been turned into a writer of mortgages -- or a landlord of rental properties, the scriptwriter can't quite seem to make up his mind. In the opening scene Scrooge gleefully tells Cratchit (Kermit the frog) and a small army of small clerks (the rats) to write up the next day's foreclosures to be delivered on Christmas. Gleefully rubbing his hands together, he declares that this is the best season of the year for mortgage lenders.

Later, however, when Marley's ghost (in the Muppet version transformed into the Marley Brothers, played by the hectoring old men from the Muppet Show) appears, they reminisce about the good old days when they evicted people from houses they couldn't afford the rent on. "Remember the year we evicted the whole orphanage? There they were, shivering in the street with their frosted teddy bears!"

Clearly, the point here is to portray Scrooge as being in the very worst possible sort of business, but what the screen writer seems to have been unclear on is that if you hold a mortgage as a lender the very worst thing that can happen to you is having to foreclose on it. If the homeowner had enough equity in the house to cover the balance owed, the homeowner would obviously sell the house, pay off the loan, and keep the balance. So foreclosures are only going to happen when the house is worth less than the balance on the loan. The lien holder sells the house to make back as much as possible of the lost money, but it'll invariably be a loss for him. If Scrooge is writing our reams and reams of foreclosures, he's probably about to go out of business. (After all, if foreclosures made lenders rich, our financial industry wouldn't be in such trouble now.)

Similarly, although a landlord stands to start making money again if he evicts renters who can't pay and replaces them with ones who can, he obviously loses rent in the mean time, and has to go through extra work getting rid of the old renters and finding new ones. A landlord would make much more money by finding good renters who can afford his rents in the first place.

So while the Muppet Christmas Carol seeks to make Scrooge out as the ultimate in greedy businessmen, they mostly only succeed in making him look deeply incompetent. How he could get rich by such means is totally unclear.

The George C. Scott adaption has a rather more historically and economically literate approach to Scrooge's business dealings. In an early scene, Scrooge goes down to the exchange where he meets with three men seeking to buy a warehouse full of grain which Scrooge owns. They ask him if he has reconsidered his price since the day before. Scrooge replies that he has: the price has gone up 5%. That's outrageous, they reply. No, says the imperturbable Scrooge, it's business. But if grain prices rise, the poor will suffer. That's their look out, says Scrooge. You'll end up with a warehouse stuffed with grain, they warn him. Surely, he replies, that's his own lookout. He then warns them that the price will increase another 5% if they wait until the next day -- on which threat he succeeds in closing the deal.

From what I've read about the mid 19th century British economy what Scrooge is probably doing here is using his considerable capital to buy up futures on the harvest for the year. Because it was a period of instability for many British farmers, it was often possible for a money lender to buy up the harvest in advance at vastly reduced prices. This relieved the farmer of the risk of a bad harvest, but lost him most of the benefit that would otherwise have come from a good year -- with the profits from a bountiful harvest instead going to lenders and traders like Scrooge. With sufficient dominance in such a market (and enough capital to be able to wait for scarcity to set in) Scrooge could also attempt to corner a market and wait for times of scarcity in order to sell his grain.

If one feels the need to imagine a business model that fits with Scrooge as presented in the story, this seems like a fairly reasonable way to go.

Gimme

This isn't our gift-giving model around here, but this has to be one of the best examples of viral marketing I've seen.

Okay, here's a pet peeve: what is it with women buying gifts for themselves "from" their husbands? If you buy it yourself, it isn't a present. Also: what is it with couples buying themselves a joint present? That's not a present, it's a joint purchase. A present is something given.

We're not all that big on presents. I got it into my head at a young age that it was greedy to show too much interest in presents, and so I'm pretty low-key about them (both receiving and giving). In fact, it's only over these past few years that I've realized that it's not in poor taste to open a gift in front of the person who gave it to you. (I don't know where this particular hang-up came from.) It's only since I had children to watch opening presents that I've come to understand that presents aren't just about materialism.