First, happy holidays and a hopeful winter solstice to all of my readers.  I recently got a notice that I have posted over 200 blogs and scores of stories, lists, and miscellanea.  Amazing.  I particularly appreciate those of you who have been with me from the beginning.  To paraphrase Tiny Tim, bless you, every one!

And so Christmas brings up that quintessential old person of holiday fiction – Scrooge.  His name has entered the English language as probably the most common word used to describe someone who is mean and miserly and … old.  In the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes Scrooge this way:

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

The original Grinch.  Scrooge is surely not the only elderly miser in literature – think of Ethan Frome, for example.  Miserliness is a trait that has been commonly used for the aged for millenniums.  Horace, in around 20 BCE, describes old men as having “desire for gain, miserliness, lack of energy, greediness for a longer life, quarrelsomeness, praise of the good old days when he was a boy, and condemnation of the younger generation.”  Of course, in days before social security and pensions, old people had every reason to be miserly – even in the face of impatient heirs.  King Lear is surely a lesson about distributing our assets before we are dead!  Scrooge has been the model for many old tightwads, including a Disney duck.  But, of course, Scrooge is not just miserly – he is mean and cautious and compassionless.  Nevertheless, he is certainly one of the stereotypes of old age – in his pre-conversion state.

But there are many oldsters in literature.  If Dickens gave us one commonly-used word for old men, Cervantes’ Don Quixote gave us another and somewhat opposite one – quixotic.  Here is how the Don is described in the beginning of Don Quixote:

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame….  and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired.  (Grossman translation)

If Scrooge was mean and “Bah Humbug,” Quixote was magnanimous and “Let’s go!”  Both got more than slightly in their own way – Scrooge saw ghosts and Quixote tilted at windmills.  One was rich and one was foolish.  Scrooge learned his lesson, and – although Quixote goes home in the end – the Don never really regrets anything.  In honesty, both men end up often making life fairly miserable for those around them, until, of course, Scrooge sees the light and Quixote turns his horse homeward.

So where is the lesson in all this from these two old men?  First, let’s admit that the elderly are entitled to some level of avarice, caution, and retrospection.  We are planning to support ourselves for a lifetime of unknown length and quality.  Our bones are fragile, our energy is limited, and our earning-power is defunct.  We may want to be Quixote, but, in all honesty, we usually wind up acting more like Scrooge.

But here’s what is admirable about Scrooge.  Albeit with the help of Christmas ghosts, he looks at the past and present honestly.  Quixote is deluded in his romantic idea of being a knight, but Scrooge has been deluded too about the results of his actions and what his money can really do for him – until the ghosts arrive. Scrooge is scared into opening up, Quixote is stuck in his delusions.

And there is this.  What Scrooge goes through during the course of A Christmas Carol is a life review.  It is a model for what the angel Clarence takes George Bailey through in It’s a Wonderful Life – albeit George needs to recall all the good he has done, while Scrooge needs to face his bad deeds. Life review is surely one of the tasks of old age.  Indeed, there seems to be an instinct that makes people want to make sense of things – to unravel the themes (not plots) of their lives.  Like miserliness, looking to the past is a trait commonly criticized in the elderly.  But, our experience may be our most valuable possession.  And I find that thinking about it is not enough.  Talking to someone else is good, but even better is to try to concisely relate what happened on paper, read it over, and determine what we have learned.  So, Scrooge does have something to teach us.  However, if you are already quixotic and out meeting the world with an open heart, more power to you!  I myself am more like Scrooge, and probably still need the assistance of ghosts.