You ever think about the fact that A Christmas Carol was doing the same Nightmare Before Christmas shtick almost 200 years earlier

A Halloween-y spoopy story for the sake of teaching "the true meaning of Christmas" via the macabre

I really liked the part of A Prayer for Owen Meany where Owen joins the cast of the crappy old community theatre production of A Christmas Carol and breathes new life into it by making The Ghost of Christmas Future *actually terrifying*

It's a ghost story

Especially as a stage play, it gets all its juice from the Ghosts being scary

The more you drain that energy from it and make the Ghosts friendly the less there's any point to the story

My whole hobbyhorse is that even though Future is the most obviously and traditionally scary Ghost (being among other things an aspect of the Reaper), the other two Ghosts in canon are *also* scary af and people don't play them that way nearly enough

Past is not a hot girl, or an adorable child, it's some kind of strange androgynous emotionless being of blinding light

Present is the most human one, but he's unsettlingly rapid-aging in real time, until at midnight Scrooge realizes he's an old man at death's door

(Owen Meany is right, of course most of us think the scariest Ghost is the one who knows what's going to happen, the inevitable consequences coming down the pike

But, shit

The older you get, the less scared you are of that

And the more you're scared of his opposite)

(You remember Don Draper's mantra, "This didn't happen"?

The Ghost of Christmases Past is the Ghost who tells you "Yes, IT DID HAPPEN"

The idea of a total recall pill, of having to live through all the stuff that happened AGAIN and know NONE of it can be changed

That's hell)