Dickens, again

 The first day of winter came with icy scenes: sunny, bitingly cold, and slippery streets and sidewalks. The roofs on the hillside I can see through my window now are still covered in snow. We had three hours of dumping rain on Tuesday, followed by snow, followed by dropping temps. I mostly tried to avoid going out, but I got hungry and went to a cafe, even the workers were still wearing heavy coats, and then had an eye appointment, so had to go out again.

I found an audio version of "A Christmas Carol" that I quite enjoy, it just says it's "Audiobooks", doesn't list the narrator. I'm reading it, as well.

To begin, Marley is decidedly dead, and we set the scene of biting cold both inside and outside of Scrooge. We meet Scrooge, who owns a counting house, his nephew, his clerk, Bob Cratchit, the two portly gentlemen collecting alms for the poor, and the ghost of Jacob Marley, former business partner of Scrooge, and who died seven years earlier on Christmas Eve.

We don't know the source of Scrooge's bitterness nor his sole value in money alone, and the acquisition of it for it's own sake rather than how it could be used for good in the world.  When asked by the gentlemen to make a donation, he asks about the debtors prisons, the workhouses, the Treadmill and the Poor Law, and why don't the poor find comfort there.

At home he is visited by the terrifying ghost of Jacob Marley who says he's come to warn Scrooge that he will share his fate of wandering the world and seeing the suffering of others with a desire to ease it, but without the means. When Scrooge comments that Marley was a good man of business, Marley cries to Scrooge, "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business."

Before he departs out the window, he warns Scrooge that he will be visited by three spirits over three subsequent nights. (Which always has confused me, it's Christmas Eve, and actually early Christmas morning when Marley appears in his room, and Scrooge goes back to work on the 26th, so is it really three separate nights?)

Oh yes, we also are introduced to Scrooge's most known words of "Bah," and "Humbug!"