12.24.2025
For me, Christmas isn’t Christmas without reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Not only that, but there are at least 3 versions of the story I HAVE to watch during the season: the 1951 British version, Scrooge (a 1970 musical - the music isn’t always great, but the movie is pretty faithful to the book), and the Muppets’ version (with Michael Caine as maybe the best of all Scrooges).
According to Dickens’ diary, the name for his most famous character, Ebenezer Scrooge, was inspired by a gravestone he came across in Edinburgh in 1841 (A Christmas Carol was published in 1843). The tombstone actually read “Ebenezer Scroggie - Meal Man. died in 1836,” but Dickens misread it as “Ebenezer Scroggie - MEAN man.” Dickens wrote in his diary, “It must have shrivelled his soul to be remembered through eternity only for being mean, a life wasted.”
I’ll come back to that.
Now Dickens may have mis-read Mr. Scroggie’s epitaph accidentally, but he changed the name from Scroggie to Scrooge on purpose. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the colloquialism, “to scrouge,” means to crush, screw, squeeze or crowd. The word first appeared in print in 1755 and the OED lists several variants: scroodge, scrooge (there it is!), scroudge, scrowge, skrouge. The early readers of the novel easily connected the name Scrooge with his character as a grasping, selfish individual, a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner."
What about his first name?
Ebenezer should sound familiar from either your Bible reading or from a well-known hymn. Ebenezer is a Hebrew word meaning "stone of help" (from eben, meaning stone and ezer meaning help. We find it in I Samuel 7:12 where the prophet Samuel erected a stone monument to commemorate God's aid in a decisive victory over the Philistines, serving as a tangible reminder of divine assistance ("Thus far the LORD has helped us!").
It’s probably most familiar to us from the beautiful 18th century hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." The second verse begins “Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by thy help I’ve come” (although some hymnals CHANGE the word rather than expecting singers to ask or look up the meaning, but that’s for another Pastor’s Note).
Together, the name Ebenezer Scrooge creates a powerful oxymoron. As Ebenezer, Dickens’ character should have been a “stone of help” to the poor and needy around him, but instead he was Scrooge, a cold, self-centered, tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.
Now, remember the headstone said he was “a meal man” which Dickens misread as “a mean man.” What is a meal man? Well, the truth is that Mr. Scroggie had been a very successful grain merchant, in other words, a “meal” man! Not only that, he was a town councillor known for generosity, jovial disposition and appetite! If you know the story, this sounds much more like that ghost of Christmas Present and the complete opposite of what Ebenezer Scrooge turned out to be.
But if Dickens had not misread that tombstone as “a mean man” when in fact it said a “meal man,” we probably wouldn’t have ended up with one of the greatest short novels of all time.
Isn’t it funny how Charles Dickens, in writing the most famous Christmas story outside of the Bible, did the exact opposite to Ebenezer Scroggie what Christmas message is supposed to do! The Christmas message is to turn the mean and hard hearted into hopeful, peaceful, joyful and loving people. Instead, Dickens took a generous, jovial fella, and turned him into the meanest man in town.
I do have to admit, though, there are those times during the Christmas season with the hurry, and the traffic, and the fretting over getting the perfect gift, and the stress of dealing with family, etc., that can cause us to act not like children of God but children of Something Else!
The Christmas message is about transformation: the transformation of a dead stump into a sign of hope, the transformation of lifelong enemies (a wolf, a lamb) into peaceful friends, the transformation of a speechless tongue into a joyfully singing tongue, and the transformation of times when it seems that all hope, peace, joy and love have forsaken us into the discovery that God has been with us all along.
And it’s about the sort of transformation that would change an Ebenezer Scrooge into an Ebenezer Scroggie! It's the transformation of a heart of stone into a heart of flesh, the transformation of an enemy of God into a child of God, and the transformation of an old lost creation into a New Creation.
And that, Charlie Brown, Ebenezer Scrooge, Henry Potter, Grinch, the Kranks, and all others who might be confused over the message of the season, is what Christmas is all about.
Wishing you all a blessed Christmas!
Pastor Terry
PS - I know I share this every year, but this setting of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London ties the bow on Christmas. By the way, this is the same descant the sopranos sang at our Lessons and Carols service this year. I hope you have the same joy the little boy at 2:42 or so has. Enjoy! Merry Christmas!
Hark the Herald Angels sing