Video Version
Since we find ourselves at Christmas Eve, it felt like a good moment to pause and look at a familiar story. Not the story of the Christ child or a retelling of the nativity, but another Christmas story.
It is one that tells us about love finding a way into the world, and about compassion and generosity softening even the hardest hearts.
There are a handful of Christmas movies we try to return to each year. Some of it is tradition, and some of it comes from a love of nostalgia. There is something grounding about watching a cartoon or a movie that has been part of our lives for a long time. It becomes something we have carried with us across many seasons, and it can keep meeting us a little differently as we grow.
One of those stories for me has always been Mickey’s Christmas Carol. It has been part of my childhood Christmases for as long as I can remember. I am sure many of you have seen it and remember that in that telling of the story, Donald Duck’s uncle Scrooge plays the part of the miser, and Mickey Mouse is left having to work on Christmas Eve just to make ends meet. As a child, I did not analyze it or think much about where it came from. I simply enjoyed returning to it, year after year.
A few years ago, I came across another film centered on Dickens and the writing of A Christmas Carol. It is called The Man Who Invented Christmas. This film offered a way inside the story. It gave me history and context, and it helped me see the familiar characters from a deeper angle.
Watching it helped me see Charles Dickens differently. Not as a distant literary figure, but as a human being under real stress. It also helped me see Scrooge differently. I was able to look past the cartoon miser and see someone shaped by fear and loss, a man who had grown hardened under the ongoing pressure of living in fear.
Of course, The Man Who Invented Christmas is a work of fiction. It takes liberties. It imagines conversations and compresses timelines in order to tell a compelling story. But when I spent a little time looking into the history behind it, I was struck by how much of the emotional pressure portrayed in the film was grounded in real life.
When Dickens sat down to write A Christmas Carol in 1843, he was not writing from a place of ease. His most recent book had failed, and money was tight. He was responsible for a growing family, with another child on the way. His publishers were skeptical, and Christmas itself was not yet the cultural centerpiece it would later become.
At the same time, Dickens was carrying the weight of his own past. His father was sent to debtor’s prison when Dickens was a boy, an experience that marked his childhood and forced him into factory work at a young age. That early trauma reemerged during this season of his life, stirring old wounds around shame, responsibility, and survival. Those experiences with poverty and insecurity never fully left him, and they shaped the way he saw the world.
Seen in that light, A Christmas Carol does not emerge from comfort or certainty. It emerges from a man trying to keep his footing, while a deeper truth about love seeks expression through his life and work.
And that context changes how I see the story.
Scrooge no longer feels like a simple villain or a moral device. He feels human, someone who learned over time that staying closed felt safer than risking loss again.
The story does not treat that hardness as something to be crushed or corrected.
Scrooge is not redeemed through punishment or shame. He is not transformed by being scolded into goodness. He is changed by being loved and seen. His heart softens as he remembers what it is to be human, and love is allowed to flow back into his life after so long of being held at a distance.
That is something The Man Who Invented Christmas captures in its own way. As Dickens struggles with the character of Scrooge, he slowly comes to see that Scrooge cannot be forced into change. He has to be understood. He has to be given a way back into relationship and community.
In both the story and the telling of how it came to be written, change does not come through force. It comes through reconnection.
That feels worth sitting with, especially on Christmas Eve.
The holidays can be beautiful, and they can also ask a lot of us. Even good moments can stir old memories, grief, and quiet pressures. Many of us carry more than we realize, and we often carry it silently.
One of the gifts of A Christmas Carol is the reminder that love does not wait for perfect conditions. It does not arrive only when everything is settled or healed. Sometimes it enters through small, human moments of kindness, and through the presence of someone like Tiny Tim, whose simple humanity softens what fear had hardened.
Love often returns that way. Not all at once, but gently, as we lean into our heart’s calling and allow ourselves to be moved.
Sometimes it is enough to pause and acknowledge that the holidays can hold many things at once. Beauty and strain. Joy and grief. Memories in all their tenderness. Even within the complexity of our relationships, it can be enough to slow down, to breathe into what is stirring inside of us, and to let love have a little more room.
If you are looking for something gentle to watch this Christmas Eve, you might consider The Man Who Invented Christmas. It is not a replacement for the traditional stories or your favorite holiday films, but it can be a companion to them, a reminder that love often finds its way into the world through very human paths.
And that has always been part of the Christmas story. It is not about perfection or performance. It is found in the quiet return to love, and in creating a little more space for love in our hearts.
I am wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a joyful New Year.
Thank you for being on this journey.
I pray that light and love accompany you on your way.
Keith Rowe is a breathworker, teacher, and founder of Vital Healing, a nonprofit that helps people reconnect with the wisdom of their heart through through breathwork, inner exploration, and walking meditation.
He is co-creator of the upcoming Walking Pilgrim app, a 33-day journey of mindful walking and presence. Sign up to receive updates for when it is released at walkingpilgrim.com.
Thanks, Keith, for providing this conscious loving perspective on human changs...with love, Jim