DE Weekly: A Christmas Carol, Humanity, & Transformation
Below is an archived email originally sent on December 29, 2025.
A Christmas Carol, Humanity, & Transformation
In existentialism, there is a great emphasis placed on personal responsibility; it is important you make the right choices so you can create a life of meaning and value. At what point after a life lived in precisely the wrong way does it become too late to change the way things are?
Every Christmas, I like to watch a few of my favorite Christmas movies, most of which are closer to 100 years old than they are to today. One of those movies is A Christmas Carol (the 1938 version).
The 1938 A Christmas Carol was the first adaptation for the screen of Charles Dickens’s classic story.
The story follows an old miser in London named Ebenezer Scrooge, who lives a life of materialism and is generally cruel to others. On Christmas Eve, he is visited by the spirit of his old business partner named Jacob Marley.
Marley appears with heavy chains hanging from his limbs attached to money boxes; a lifetime of greed and selfishness has doomed him to this fate.
He warns Scrooge that the same fate awaits him lest he take advantage of his chance at redemption: three spirits (the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come) will visit him and give him that chance.
After Scrooge goes to sleep, he is visited in succession by those three spirits.
The spirit of Christmas Past shows him scenes from his childhood, specifically ones that shaped how he views Christmas today.
The spirit of Christmas Present shows him scenes of people he knows today, and how his actions have affected those people (specifically his recently fired employee Bob Cratchit).
The spirit of Christmas Yet to Come is perhaps the most poignant and meaningful of the three, as it terrifies Scrooge and ultimately causes him to change his ways.
In the written story, Dickens describes the spirit showing Scrooge his own death:
“‘Am I that man who lay upon the bed?’, he cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
‘No, Spirit! Oh no, no!’
The finger still was there.
‘Spirit!’, he cried, tight clutching at its robe, ‘hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?’
For the first time, the hand appeared to shake.
‘Good Spirit,’ he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: ‘Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life.’
The kind hand trembled.”
In the end, Scrooge redeems himself. He swears to live in the Past, Present, and Future, and to observe Christmas all the year.
What happened inside Scrooge’s mind? Why did these spirits have such a profound impact so as to be able to crack an old man’s lifelong habits?
What Scrooge experienced was an examination of conscience.
He was called to reject the isolation he had chosen to live in, and to embrace the Other, that is, other people in the world deserving of his consideration.
Scrooge had every material good and riches beyond his every need––and it still wasn’t enough. He lacked humanity, that same humanity which makes life truly worth living.
In no simple terms, Scrooge experienced a spiritual rebirth which saw his Self totally transcended from what it had been in the past to something entirely different, something better.
You could say Scrooge had an existential crisis. He peered into the future at his own death and his fate after death, and did not like what he saw. So what did he do? He acted upon it. He took his fate into his own hands and ventured to change it.
If existentialism is a humanism then Scrooge realized such. He realized that authenticity in life begins with the Self, but must extend to the Other.
Scrooge is thrust into a scenario where he has no control. The spirits take him on a journey showing him not what he wants to see, but what he needs to see. And then they give him a choice.
Either make the right choice, change your path, and transcend yourself, or you will meet a fate of ultimate meaninglessness if you continue on this path.
In the end, Scrooge makes the right choice. He embraces his radical freedom and the ability to reshape his life, he embraces the Good of the Other, and he embarks on creating a life of meaning in the time he has left on Earth.
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” –– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Last year at this time, I wrote a newsletter about another one of my favorite Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life. Read that one too if you have time. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I’ll see you in 2026.
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