Ebenezer Scrooge was impervious to change. With a crusty visage spotted with age, the cantankerous Scrooge spat at charity, scowled at children, and scoffed at any goodwill within arm’s reach. “If I could work my will,” Scrooge fumed, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Scrooge, according to his creator Charles Dickens, “was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone . . . a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” Little could engender kindness and wonder in this unforgiving miser—little except for time with ghosts over the witching hours of Christmas Eve. Before Christmas Day would dawn, the fortress that is Scrooge would be leveled. He would find himself cowering at a graveside before a black-robed spectre. “Assure me that I yet may change…