Merry Christmas Scrooge

What better thing to do on a Friday morning before Christmas than to remember Dickens’ Christmas Carol and try to emulate old Scrooge. Oh, not the Scrooge at the beginning of the story but the one at the end as described in the penultimate paragraph of the story:

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

In my case I have been reviewing all the requests for donations and charitable giving that have come across my desk in the past three months. I decided that I get so many of these toward the end of the year that I may as well save them all up to the end of the year and allocate out my donation budget at one time. That way all the charities and worthy causes catch me in the same mood.

But how to decide who gets what because I certainly don’t have a limitless budget for such giving. And how does one compare the starving children in Africa to the worthy cause of free speech in America or the plight of the Iraqi war wounded to the publicly supported local NPR station. I will have to say that it used to be much easier when paying tithing was about all our family budget could stand so there were no other causes I could support. We simply ignored the other causes.

I don’t have the final answer but I do know that I felt much better at the end of this exercise than I did at the beginning. And Scrooge would understand what I mean.