(I’m unplugging a bit for the holidays. This blog was first published on December 21, 2020)
I love love Christmas movies. I love the classics like “It’s a wonderful life,” newer movies that are becoming classics like “Polar Express,” and all the romantic holiday movies on Netflix. I know they are corny, but I seriously love them.
So when Julie Ann Cairns used a Christmas movie/story to dispel a money myth, I was hooked!
The myth was money corrupts you, and she used “The Christmas Carol.”
In the classic story, you are initially led to believe that Scrooge is corrupt because he has money. This myth is reinforced by Tiny Tim’s family, who is poor but loving. At the opening of the story, you are led to believe that evil corrupts.
However, if you look closer, you will see almost right away that Dickens is trying to tell us a different story. Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, has money but is kind and generous with it. He is our first introduction to the possibility that money is not the root of all evil.
So what is Dicken’s trying to tell us? Well, if I believe Julie Ann Cairns, Dicken’s presents us with the idea that the combination of our material and emotional mindset or belief in a lack of abundance is what leads us to evil.
Through the ghosts, we learn of the emotional hardships Scrooge endured as a child through the story. Hurts that shaped him very early. The emotional wounds turned him from a happy, kind child to the angry, scarcity-focused person we meet at the story’s start.
As the story progresses, we start to see a change in Scrooge as each ghost opens his eyes, and he starts to see the error in his ways. We begin to see him move from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset.
By the end of the story, we see Scrooge transform. We see him start to do good with his wealth, and we see him begin to facilitate a life of happiness and satisfaction for himself and others.
The moral: money is not the root of evil, nor does money corrupt.
I’d love to hear what you think of Julie Ann Cairns’s interpretation of “The Christmas Carol.”
I’d also love to hear what your favorite Christmas movie is. Mine is “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. Charles Dickens
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
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