Christmas 2025

CHAPTER I

The Merciless Vetter

Marley was dead, to begin with. Dead as a doornail, there is no doubt whatever about that as, indeed, no company ledger would ever entertain the slightest uncertainty. Yet despite how thoroughly dead he remained, a new spectre now stalked the halls of office and commerce: the cold, unyielding heart of Ebenezer Scrooge, a hiring manager – and the most merciless vetter – of our present age.

Ah! But his miserliness was not of ledger and coin alone! Long had it curdled into a poverty of the spirit and a poverty of the soul, born of a suspicion that clung to every human being who crossed his path. Therein, proud of his power to employ – upon which he would secretly nourish himself – Scrooge would sit alone each day in his narrow office, as a poorly backlit spectre, preying and gloating not upon his musty register, but more still on the pallid glow of a screen upon which he would perform his infamous, hollow, and petty “due diligence”: prying into private lives, weighing joys against metrics, and treating sincerity, probity, skill and trust as if they could be audited by the cold machinery of algorithms — Orwellian in design, tyrannical in intent.

“Aha!” he would cry. “How dare they display such a happiness that I alone am meant to bestow by the grace of my employment! And there, this other one — a young woman, radiant with joy, basking in the very love I have never known!”

Yet, for the many other solemn souls — starch-collared, tight-buttoned, and so utterly drained of vitality as if fear and regret had led them to banish all youth from their mortal frames — Scrooge would, indeed, find his utter and grim consolation: “What a marvellous and most appropriate posture!” he would mutter, as if purring with selfish satisfaction, while still fancing in his towering vanity, that such portraits of grey deference had been purposely kindled by the mere summons to his presence, as if driven by a fervent, almost desperate passion for the grand, life-altering prospect that only his patronage could bestow upon them.

He was, however – as so many of us are – stark blind to the tragic truth: that such phantom joy and shivering subservience were never meant for him, but solely as a desperate pageant, staged for the fleeting promise of service and humble income, marshalled as a shield against the fear of disapproval and discrimination and born of the quiet, agonizing hope to rise and escape the howling depths of hunger, bigotry, and despair.

But let it be warned, that however cruel such judgments might be, they were not entirely born of malice or vanity, as it might be sus-pected. At their root and spring stood, indeed, a far deeper and origi-nal sin: that of an uncharitable envy of those simple joys he had long since cast from a life entirely his own.

Verily, he would turn his eye to a young bride’s wedding photo-graphs and henceforth pronounce her utterly lacking in seriousness; or to a father’s modest holiday travels and decry his supposed want of dedication; or even to law graduates, caught in their university years, rejoicing over their most innocent indulgences.

“Hmph!” he would mutter. “The most miserable portrait! Are those supposed to be skills worth showcasing? And expecting me to pay for such nonsense?"

“Dear Lord! Wearing a mop-head as though it were the ceremonial wig? Order! Order! And what’s this — a toilet‑brush sceptre? The laurels of leadership, apparently! Outrageous! All of them — the most notorious liabilities to all my pencil-timed endeavours and success.”

“Grrrr!!! And that one, over there, I do declare!” he would cry, his face contorting in disgust. “Is that not underwear I see perched atop his very head? Does he not know the yellow ought to face forward, and the brown to the back? No! No! No! No employment for such nonsense!”

“Of a certainty, if summoned to witness all this parade of irreverence, the poor Bob Cratchit himself would not faint without first lashing out the most superb and unheard unchristian word!”

Christmas 2025

CHAPTER II

The Assize of the Soul

Alas, on a certain Christmas Eve, as the chimes of midnight echoed through the city, a ghastly apparition came to appear before him: it was the Ghost of Christmas Past. “Who… are you?” he hesitated, striving to make the night’s twilight alight, “and what business have you come to coin from me at this hour of the night?”

Yet, before the spectre unveiled its purpose of recalling the memories of bygone years, it stirred him by the hand and laid him upon a lonely cliff, where he was left standing, trembling at the edge, the abyss yawning beneath him and his feet scrabbling for purchase on loose soil. Crying for help, his limbs flailing like a hapless marionette upon the strings of fate, a strong hand suddenly reached toward him. But as he gasped and reached for it, a chilling thought stopped him cold.

“No, wait!” he shrieked to the ghost. “I must reason carefully. Has this hand been properly vetted? How do I know it possesses the necessary strength and skills to pull me from this precipice? I had better be cautious — after all, it is my very life that hangs by a thread!”

And in that same instant, while the vision was made to fade away in helpless censure and disapprobation, the spirit moved to reveal to him a new frame: the profiles of real people, the very ones he had once so callously scrolled past. However, with a voice as mournful as a winter wind, hollow and unrelenting, the spirit did not show him the imagined flaws upon which he had passed his judgments. Instead, it revealed the stolen opportunities, the broken hopes, and the careers unjustly denied to good and honest souls who had simply chosen to live with spirit and joy, and to commit and deliver to all others nothing more than kindness and purpose, instead of profit, eavesdropping betrayal and covetous treason.

He then saw, for the first time, not the superficialities he had sought out, but the vibrant human truths he had so foolishly dismissed from his being and from his service; and with them, fatally, the truest and deepest tragedy of prejudice: the one born not of cruelty, but of sheer blindness; that very same gently rocked and cradled in ignorance and conformity, while quietly summoned to inherit nothing more than jealousy and bias.

Then came the Ghost of Christmas Present, a figure of fleeting images and urgent cries. Ah! But this spirit would not take him to witness a bustling family feast – far from it! Instead, it would move to reveal to him the bitter consequences of his pitiless actions. For Scrooge was then made to newly witness the very people he had once deemed so unforgivingly unfit for hire, but this time, no longer enraptured with the welcoming faces and smiles he had once dismissed with a careless glance.

Indeed, their expressions were now etched with the quiet despair his judgments had since carved, and their empty tables, once set with hope, were dressed now with nought but a mere and empty silence. Thus, he beheld at last, the profound desperation born of unemploy-ment, the families he had splintered, and the futures he had stolen with a single, thoughtless click of his mouse. But even more, he saw how dark and soulless their eyes – if not their very souls – had now decayed, lingering lifeless and motionless at the centre, as if calmly waiting, like that which from the deep always lures its prey.

And in that heavy moment, stumbling backward as his legs trem-bled beneath his skinny weight, he was made to collapse into reason and, at length, to fear and understand: that what he had draped as a mere business decision was, foolishly enough, the silent trigger of another’s suffering – now turned into lycan strength – and from which there would be nothing left to reap but endless sorrows and most unwelcome regrets.

Christmas 2025

CHAPTER III

Heritage

At last, another silent and chilling phantom – the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – appeared before him, pointing not to a grave-stone, but rather, through that same dim, embracing light and sparse autumn leaves, unto the tomb of a bleak and solitary existence shaped entirely by his own choices.

In this terrible vision, Scrooge found himself standing alone in his great, empty office, fiercely defying – but then hopelessly beholding –his phone silent and his agenda barren. His customers – he sobbed – had all abandoned him for a world that better prized trust and com-mitment over bias and suspicion.

For in such a world – he further bewailed, with cryptic dismay – discrimination and prejudice could never go unnoticed nor be left unanswered, but always returned to the very hand that had cast them with nothing left to rule but its own self-inflicted ruin – like a ship-wrecked soul stranded upon a barren island of its own creation, for-lorn and left to wither in silence and in its own suffocating forsakenness.

He then realized that an unemployed person is also a client who was never given the chance to be, a voice silenced before it could speak, and a relationship lost before it could begin. And among those vanished voices were the very people he had once deemed unworthy – not merely of employment or of a fair income, but of the dignity to become his clients, his investors, and his stakeholders, and thus bring forth, to his own need of sustenance, their own business, their own savings, and ultimately their own blessings.

They were not, indeed, merely lost opportunities for others – as cold reason might dictate – but, as he ultimately conceded with great lament, lost relationships for him, wherein he had so deeply and fool-ishly gambled the very substance of his own existence.

In his cold calculus, he had forgotten that every person excluded from income is also excluded from commerce, from contribution, and from community. For that which is absent from income is also to be as if buried alive to the world. And so it was that, through his relent-less spying and prejudice, he had become a soul suspended in a profound and desolate world of his own making, already foreseeing a vast future inheritance of nothing but the chilling wind of his own loneliness and enduring dryness to keep him company.

Even more unforgivingly, soon after, the phantom brought him to a lonely hill, where a gnarled and desolate tree stood twisted, like the regrets of a lifetime. Beneath its barren limbs lay a man, his clothes tattered and his body still in the biting wind. Above him, crows circled with open beaks, their cries sharp and eager, as if signalling a grim feast. The man had succumbed to a loneliness and a state of exile far too cruel to endure. And as Scrooge drew closer, a cold dread gripped his throat. The man he beheld was himself.

Christmas 2025

CHAPTER IV

Penitence

However, the penitence was still far from being over, as the ghost guided him next to another forsaken rise, where in the shadows hud-dled a very old and poignant woman – starving, her body draped in threadbare rags. Scrooge, pondering with great unease the wretched-ness of her fate, realized then, with a sudden jolt of horror, that she had once been a beautiful woman in her prime, whose youthful poise and curated image had once allowed her to pass every hollow vetting of public appraisal.

But now, aged in full view of a merciless, scrutinizing world, stripped of the power to conceal the ravages of time, she had nothing left to offer but the dust of her long forgotten dignity. And so he saw, too, the terrible doom that awaits us all in such a world of careless judgment and expiry: to lose value, yield and interest, like a com-modity; to grow old, bereft of youth and past achievements, and thus left forfeited and abandoned, and with great repugnance cast aside.

A sudden chilling terror rushed in and crept into Scrooge’s now open heart as he likewise understood. This was the dark future he himself had built – a world so cruel it held no pity even for those it had once cherished. And in that moment of absolute clarity, he real-ized that the woman he had abandoned to algorithmic cruelty and his own social prejudice was, in truth, the very one who had first brought him into light. For in the cruellest turn of fate, he so foresaw – with devastating clarity – that this woman was closer to him than his own breath: she was his very own mother.

Heaving, yet unwavering, she then reached for a moldy crust of bread, carefully hidden and preserved through years of bitter sacrifice. Though it had long since decayed in quiet anticipation, she had bravely withheld it from her own hunger. And so she raised it above her head, opening the clouds, as if bearing an offering. But with a final, agonizing relief, she soon turned away from him, laying herself against a tree, resting her arms draped across its branches as if bear-ing silent witness to a sacrifice long since made. There, she fell into her final sleep, whispering a parting kiss, as flowers and leaves gath-ered around her, embracing her within their quiet hold.

“Mother,” Scrooge whispered, his voice overcome with tears. She smiled back at him then, one last time – but not for herself. Only for the quiet release of knowing her son was at last free from what she had so viciously endured. And so, as her reason for being had been fulfilled, the burden of such unfair existence was no longer hers to bear – nor should it pass on to him: bigotry itself would not be his to inherit.

“No! Kind Spirit, no! Pray, take me back,” he sobbed, his voice cracking with desperation. “I will undo this! I shall not pry, nor search, nor presume again! How could I have allowed myself to be so blindly deceived by the primal prejudice I had draped in the noble robes of profit and reason?”

Christmas 2025

FINAL STAVE

Redemption

Thereafter, and while still begging for deliverance, he suddenly found himself awakening in his own bed, in his own home, and in his very own room. The day was radiant, and the chamber was warm and comfortable as light poured through the window, innocent and unburdened.

Outside, the birds sang, whistling a bright symphony as fragrant as perfume. Rising in great surrender, he then ran through the house, as though needing to assure himself that the dreadful visions he had just endured – and which still haunted his mind – were truly gone.

In the larger chamber, however, he suddenly froze his steps in grave caution and anticipation upon beholding a quiet and sunlit room. Its window stood wide open, and the curtains, once drawn, now gently unfurled to the music of the sweetest breeze. At the centre stood a table, perfectly set, draped with a white-golden flowered linen, as if prepared to welcome a guest already risen and left.

Upon it rested a single rose beside a plate bearing a crust of bread. Startled by fear and wonder, he gently approached it, radiantly realizing that the bread was still warm and that the mold was gone. Hence, with a trembling sense of relief washing over him, he finally understood: through such overwhelming night, he had just been nourished by resurrection itself.

Thereby, stormed by a warmth and beaming smile that claimed possession of his heart, he so discovered where to lay his greatest enterprise: he would not eat it. He would share it – like a seed waiting to be sown. And so, rushing to dress and step outside, he held the bread with great reverence, going ahead joyfully breaking it into ever-overflowing halves as though dividing and sharing the very flesh of his own.

Christmas 2025

TESTAMENT

The Covenant

Signed in haste and reverence,

Upon the dawn of the great misunderstanding,

whereby the misuse of the private self,

all shall come to have dearly mistaken:

Privacy for secrecy,

Communion for indulgence,

and Blindness for enlightenment.

For wherever generosity is to be ambushed by perfidy,

And freedom itself, made fearful of liability,

Thus, the sacrificial lamb

– and the bread, broken and shared –

no longer to be received as love nor redemption:

Only as expended, forsaken,

and forfeited circumstance.