There's the saucepan that the gruel was in, cried Scrooge, starting off again and going round the fireplace.

There's the door by which the ghost of Jacob Marley entered.

There's the corner where the ghost of Christmas present sat. There's the window where I saw the wandering spirits.

It's all right. It's all true. It all happened. Okay, how can you not just start laughing even in that little passage from the end of a Christmas

Carol? If you've been reading my sister's novel, A Christmas Carol with

a Kay about a woman who has visited by spirits and has to break out of her kind of girl-boss workaholic

mentality then you might have noticed that that passage from Charles Dickens

a Christmas Carol was the epigraph to the book. It sort of opens up the book and I love that line. I love that scene at the end of the whole story when Scrooge is waking back up and he's realizing that he still has time to reform his life and he still lives in the real world

but everything that he saw and experienced in the kind of overnight experience of mystical encounter with these ghosts,

that all happened. It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. It seems to have stretched out

for this vast amount of time, but they've left him nevertheless back on Christmas Day returning to kind of the quote-unquote real world and the real timeline.

And I remember that line most specifically I think from the

Alistair Sim version of the movie which we watch every year at Christmas, my

family, it's a sacrosanct tradition. You have to get your whiskey and your

cookies and whatever else you're going to snack on while you're watching the movie. You have to

like acquire all of that before the whole thing starts because once the lights go down and

the movie starts nobody speaks nobody even so much as breathes loudly we all love

this movie profoundly and it's really short and so you can you know get through it

very quickly without any bathroom breaks or whatever else but every line from that movie many of which are taken from Dickens' own writing,

every line from that movie is kind of graven into my brain.

And in our family, in our household, when we go home for Christmas.

We'll constantly just be quoting different lines like, you know, when my mom is making dinner

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