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Over the past few years, I’ve reminded you of the best Christmas specials and talked about some classic Christmas music. This year, it’s time to clear the field for the greatest adaptation of the greatest Christmas story.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Colorado Supreme Court just gave Republicans a chance to save themselves. The Colorado ruling calls the originalists’ bluff. Trump insists he hasn’t read Mein Kampf.

The holidays are a time to look back on a long year, but also to look forward to the new one. Give an Atlantic subscription to someone close to you and they’ll get a year of the best coverage on the most important stories—to stay informed and inspired as we enter the new year.

An Actual Ghost Story

Christmas, no matter what your religious beliefs, is a wonderful time to cherish our friends and family but also, in the season’s spirit of reconciliation, to recognize and embrace our common humanity with people everywhere. In the approaching depths of winter, we can recommit to kindness, peace, and joy. That’s why I would like to take this opportunity, right before the holiday, to make you all mad one more time with one of my cultural takes.

There are some good adaptations of the Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, and many bad ones, but only one truly great version, and it is the 1984 made-for-television movie starring George C. Scott.

Wait. Hear me out.

I know that many people are intensely loyal to the 1951 version (titled A Christmas Carol in the United States, and released in the U.K. as Scrooge), starring Alastair Sim. I understand why. It’s charming, in its way, but it is also enduring because so many of us grew up with it. For a time, it was like It’s a Wonderful Life, the black-and-white wallpaper always there in the background after Thanksgiving. And Sim is wonderful: He was only 50 when he filmed Scrooge but he looks much older; his Scrooge is so deformed by sin that his transformation later in the story is almost a physical change, wondrous and giddy.

But for me, too much of Scrooge is formal and stagey. And let’s not even talk about the other versions from the 1930s, or the Muppets, or Bill Murray, or the cartoons, or the more arty takes. Some of them are truly awful. (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce.)

When I first saw the Scott version, however, I loved the tighter connection to the book, and especially the attention to detail and atmosphere. No, it doesn’t really snow that much in London, but the 1984 version is so evocative that you can almost smell Scrooge’s musty bedroom, the happy stink of the open-air butchers and fishmongers, and the scrawny goose roasting in Mrs. Cratchit’s tiny kitchen.

Most important, just as Sim carried Scrooge, this version is Scott’s movie, despite the outstanding actors around him. Scott was an American, and his British accent slips now and then—I always wince when he tries to get his tongue around “I wonder you don’t go into Parl-ya-ment”—but years of hard living gave him a face, a voice, and a stare that no other Scrooge could match.

And yes, he was fat. Scrooge, in most other iterations, is a scrawny geezer who doesn’t eat much or drink or “make merry” at Christmas. But Scott’s Scrooge is a barrel-chested bully, an imposing and nasty piece of work. He’s not particularly disciplined or monkish; he’s just a corpulent old bastard who can’t remember that he was once a human being.

Then there are the ghosts. They’re deeply unsettling apparitions, which makes Scott’s version a bit more PG-13 than most of the other adaptations.

Frank Finlay’s Marley, in particular, is not some old pal coming to issue a friendly warning. Marley is a damned soul, wailing and doomed. He’s a rotting corpse, for crying out loud. Angela Pleasence is a radiant and annoying Ghost of Christmas Past. At first, I found her off-putting, and then I realized: She’s supposed to be annoying. She’s not guiding Scrooge on a nostalgia tour of his youth; she’s taking acidic delight in showing Scrooge what a jerk he’s become. Every Scrooge loses his temper at these “pictures from the past,” but Scott’s anger seems especially justified as Pleasence smirks at him.

Edward Woodward, however, steals every scene he’s in as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Instead of some phantasmic simp gently reminding Scrooge of the need for Christian charity, Woodward is a striding giant, a knight of Christmas whose mirth barely conceals his moral rage. When observing Bob Cratchit’s family doting on Tiny Tim, he snarls to Scrooge: “It may well be that, in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child!” Woodward delivers it not as a rebuke but as a threat, and that moment still sends a chill through me.

I also have a very personal reason for loving Scott’s version more than any other.

My father was, if not a Scrooge, something of a Grinch, as my mother called him every year. He growled about how Christmas was a giant, expensive pain in the ass. But my dad was a churchgoing Christian, and he harbored a secret love for the holiday. Despite his bah-humbug approach, he insisted on a real tree every year, leaving the decorating to me and my mother. He wrapped his own presents, if you can count “rolling them through paper and tape” as “wrapping.” He and I would go to Christmas Eve services (in Greek Orthodox churches, they’re usually in the late afternoon or early evening) every year while my mother prepared dinner.

But my father was also a very difficult man, and my parents had an extremely volatile marriage. Like many men, my father carried his share of sins and secrets. And like most men of his generation, he did not often speak of them. Some, I know, weighed on him to the very end of his life.

So I was surprised when, one night in the mid-1980s, he joined us to watch A Christmas Carol. We sat in our dark living room with a small fire and no light but the blinking tree. He was chatty and seemed to enjoy it, but he became very quiet toward the end, when Scrooge realizes that at a not-so-distant future Christmas, he is dead and no one cares. Alone in the darkness and the snow, Scott pleads for mercy not like some accomplished thespian in the scene of his life but like an old man at the edge of the abyss, one who now fully understands how his own actions brought him to a desolate end.

I looked over at my parents. My mom was holding my father’s hand. And my father, quiet in the dark, had tears on his cheeks.

Until that moment, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen my father cry, including at his mother’s funeral—and certainly never at a movie. Scott got to him, perhaps because Scott’s Scrooge was a man my father could understand: loud, tough, and full of anger and regret, rather than the effete, pinched-face slip of a fellow played by Sim and others.

In later life, I sometimes feel the same tears welling in my eyes when Scott pleads for one more chance. These tears are not only for my father, who struggled with his own burdens to the end of his life, but for myself as well. It’s easy to hate Scrooge when you’re young and think you have plenty of time to straighten yourself out. When you’re older, you start to wonder how much time you’ve let get by you, and whether you and the elderly miser have more in common than you might like to admit.

Scott’s A Christmas Carol isn’t perfect; it has some especially cringeworthy and twee moments with Tiny Tim. But this isn’t Tim’s story. It’s about looking into the grave and realizing that on Christmas—or any day, really—it is always within our power to change our heart and to become, like Scrooge, “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city knew.”

To borrow another line from Dickens: May that be truly said of all of us.

Merry Christmas. See you next week.

Related:

We need a little Christmas (music). The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.

Today’s News

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Egypt for talks with Egyptian officials about a possible new cease-fire in Gaza and hostage swaps. After three years of negotiations, the European Union reached a provisional agreement to overhaul its asylum and migration laws. Pending ratification, the pact aims to make it easier to limit the entry of migrants while still protecting the right to asylum, according to EU officials. The World Health Organization designated the new JN.1 coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest” yesterday because of its “rapidly increasing” spread.

Evening Read

Pablo Delcan

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

By Tim Alberta

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day …

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals … Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

Read the full article.

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This is a breaking news story, more details to follow.

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From time to time, I visit a friend who has been enormously successful in business. He has an office in New York City that is decorated top to bottom with memorabilia of his many achievements. On the wall are framed magazine covers with his smiling face—CEO of the Year! On the bookshelves are dozens of knickknacks engraved with the dates of when he bought or sold a company.

His office is like a shrine to past glories, and an obvious source of pride. Recently, however, he surprised me by saying he plans to get rid of all of these trophies. I asked why, and he told me that his business has struggled of late, and the trophies are only making his troubles seem worse. “I feel as if they’re mocking me.”

This phenomenon has been called the “Ozymandias problem,” an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem about the once-great ancient-Egyptian pharaoh (also known as Ramesses II), who is memorialized by a long-eroded statue—of which nothing recognizable remains after many millennia except the inscription on its base: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The Ozymandias problem refers to the futility of our efforts to immortalize our accomplishments. The one who would despair, of course, would be the pharaoh himself, were he alive to see his ruined statue.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The red pill of humility]

Like my friend, almost all of us enjoy commemorating our achievements, but we must also face the inevitable fact that our worldly triumphs will decay with the passage of time. This realization can be a source of bitterness and keep us stuck in the past. Then, as my friend found, our trophies might end up mocking us. But only if we let them. If, instead, we choose to celebrate and remember what truly matters in life, we can enjoy the past and the present, despite what time brings our way.

Your trophies might be a silver cup from winning a pickleball tournament, a Phi Beta Kappa pin, stuffed-and-mounted animals, or pictures of yourself with celebrities. Such awards and mementos might seem like a simple matter, but they’re not. Trophies attempt simultaneously to stop time and to substitute a concrete object for an abstract experience.

Say you win a spelling bee as a kid. The moment of victory is sweet—it stimulates your brain’s ventral striatum, part of the cognitive-reward circuit. But that sweetness is both ephemeral and intangible—a moment marked by your identifying a series of letters more accurately than your competitors. To freeze that feeling of pleasure in time and make it more concrete, you receive a certificate with the inscription Seventh-Grade Spelling Champion, which you have framed and put up on your wall, where it stays for years.

Because we value our victories so highly, we value the associated trophies—even trivial ones—in ways that might seem irrational. Social scientists have demonstrated this trait using clever experiments. For example, in 2014, two German economists administered a simple competitive math test to one group among 76 adults. The winners—those with the highest scores—received a “trophy,” an ordinary pen worth 2.10 euros, and the losers got nothing. They were then asked to name the price for which they would be willing to part with their pens; the average amount was 4.40 euros. Evidently, this plain object was now endowed with some emotional value above and beyond its utility. When the losers were asked how much they would pay for the identical pen, they quoted an average price of 57 cents, suggesting an aversion to someone else’s trophy, which would presumably remind them of their defeat.

Trophies of all types are intended to make us happier by evoking a positive memory. And plenty of research has shown that recalling past happy experiences can improve well-being by lowering stress and reducing feelings of sadness. Not coincidentally, people who are suffering from persistent and intense sadness may struggle to recall positive autobiographical experiences. A good happiness habit is to keep a journal of happy memories, such as fun days with loved ones and moments of peace and tranquility, and then turn to this journal in moments of strife and stress.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why the most successful marriages are start-ups, not mergers]

But memorializing extraordinary victories is different from recalling sweet moments in ordinary life. Although the latter are happy times you can reasonably hope to replicate—a reminder that life can be good—the former can set you up for an unhappy comparison with your former self.

Suppose you get fired from your job. This can hurt a lot, and may temporarily make you feel worthless. Thinking of happy times with friends and family can help you at such a moment, reminding you that there are still plenty of people who love and value you. But looking at your framed Employee of the Month award from better times is probably a bad idea.

Trophy-keeping can be an example of what I call “invidious intertemporal autocomparison” (don’t judge me; coming up with fancy technical terms is one way academics get tenure). In one study showing how this syndrome can hurt you, Eastern European researchers asked people to evaluate what their life was like before the fall of Communism compared with their current circumstances. The researchers found that the better people’s past existence seemed to them in retrospect, the lower their well-being would be in the present.

Imagine living with someone who went out of their way to remind you every day that you used to be younger and more attractive, or that you used to have better ideas and more energy. That would be an abusive relationship. But this is in effect what you are doing to yourself if you adorn your home or workplace with trophies of your past accomplishments.

None of this is to suggest that you should enter your very own witness-protection program and erase your whole past. Personal mementos are fine. The problem with conventional trophies is that where your happiness is concerned, they get the time frame wrong and commemorate the wrong things. Here are three ideas for how to make sure you keep only the trophies that bring you joy—and that never mock you.

1. Get the time frame right.
Golfers always complain that they aren’t playing well, because they compare today’s score with their best score ever. Better instead to remember that the only game that matters—if it is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby—is the one you’re playing today. So it is with life. Each day is an adventure with the potential for highs and lows, one full of experiences appropriate to your age and circumstances.

Instead of hanging a medal on the wall that marked some achievement that would be beyond you now, honor the thing that you did today—and that you’ll also be able to do tomorrow. Take a minute each evening to jot down the day’s best moment—maybe it was a conversation or a meal or finishing a project at work. Celebrate it in any way you like (as I’ve confessed before, I like a piece of candy). Put the reminder note about your happy time on the fridge or leave it on your desk. Tomorrow, throw it away and make a new one.

[Juliet Lapidos: There is a culture industry that gives its top prizes to women]

2. Commemorate what matters.
If you want to keep trophies of your life’s peak achievements, then at least pick the right ones to hold on to: They should be the moments of greatest intrinsic satisfaction, not of extrinsic adulation. I have met award-winning actors and athletes, but I don’t know a single one who would trade celebrating her child’s birthday for winning an Oscar or Olympic gold. As long as the reminder of your greatest loves is connected to a relationship that is still strong and full, celebrating the highlights won’t mock you. Memorialize the relationship with favorite moments: your wedding photo, for example. These trophies remind you that your victory is not a closed and finished episode in your past but something that you’re still winning.

3. If the trophies mock you, toss them.
My friend was finding it hard to clear out the trophy shelf in his office. He is quite attached to all the doodads and pictures of himself, and he fears that he will lose touch with his sense of self-worth without them. But they are interfering with his quality of life, and when he finally gets rid of them, he will feel a lot freer and better—as though he is finally living in the present. You can do the same thing. If a physical object causes you the least bit of chagrin, ditch it.

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is intended as a cautionary tale that juxtaposes ephemeral human magnificence with the remorseless passage of time. The poem ends with these forlorn lines:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I have been to the Egyptian deserts once ruled by Ramesses II, but I had an entirely different reaction to the sands stretching into the distance: I found them indescribably beautiful, not sad. No doubt, this was the same beauty that Shelley’s traveler, contemplating the great king’s fate, could have marveled at. But reflecting on the illusory glory symbolized by the monarch’s derelict statue, he failed to enjoy the natural glory before his very eyes. Don’t make the Ozymandias mistake and miss the beauty of your present by fetishizing the monuments of your past.

Egyptian security sources say aid and fuel trucks from Egypt have stopped, as UN officials say aid delivery in doubt.

The Egyptian presidential elections are scheduled to take place over a three-day period starting on December 10.