By Lee A. Daniels

‘Tis the season for me to once again defend one of my fictional heroes—Ebenezer Scrooge, the central character of Charles Dickens’ classic morality tale, A Christmas Carol.

Each Christmas season, the name of the much-maligned Scrooge is bandied about as a synonym for meanness, greed, and miserliness.

On the one hand, it’s not at all difficult to understand why. The point of the 19th-century story, which Dickens set in the London of a century earlier, is to describe the path of Scrooge’s redemption. But that outcome hardly seems likely when Dickens first introduces him to us.

That Ebenezer Scrooge, a Midas beyond measure, is a hard-hearted man – “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

Scrooge berates and grossly underpays his clerk, the saintly Bob Cratchit. We realize he has virtually stolen the house of his late partner, Jacob Marley. And he gives no sympathy to or money for the poor. “Are there no prisons? … And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” he thunders when two do-gooders seek charity from him to help bring a small bit of Christmas cheer to the destitute. He quickly and unceremoniously ushers them out of his office and returns to his favorite—and only—activity: minding his own soulless financial business.

That sentiment begins to change that very night, Christmas Eve, when Scrooge, is visited, first, by Marley’s ghost and then the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

In the end, Scrooge is redeemed. But Dickens has previously described the error of his ways in such delightful fashion that the world ever since has seemed to consider Scrooge’s change of heart only in terms of its superficial sentimentality and casts Bob Cratchit, his wife, Belle, and, of course, Tiny Tim, as the true heroes of the tale.

In fact, Scrooge’s shedding the selfishness and callousness he used to amass his wealth is heroic. He comes to accept the words of wisdom delivered by his first ghostly visitor, Jacob Marley, that “Mankind [is] my business … the common welfare [is] my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence [are] all my business.”

Finally, Scrooge understands that the question he had blurted out upon discovering the children, Ignorance and Want—wrapped in rags, their bodies shrunken and hollowed-out by hunger—sheltered by the voluminous robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, is an eternal question, and challenge, to humanity itself.

“Have they no refuge or resource?” he cries. The Ghost sarcastically repeats the words Scrooge himself had used to dismiss appeals to his conscience. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

Dickens’ story was set in a time when the poor who had jobs lived a miserable existence and those who didn’t lived a brutal one. But its guiding principle—of the need for compassion and generosity toward those less fortunate—are as important to follow to today as ever.

Of course, one can say that the poor are far better off today than in 18th or 19th century England, or 1960s America, for that matter. That would be true.

But the growing number of Americans of all kinds now caught in a fierce downward economic spiral—out of work, and running out of unemployment benefits, with no job prospects in sight, and bills for house or apartment, car, children’s medical care and schooling, and all the other necessities of life coming due underscore how scant is the comfort that fact provides. From high and low levels, the modern-day bells of American society—statistics—are warning of the economic threat stalking America’s present and future. That threat could produce the modern-day equivalent of the grim destitution Dickens portrayed in A Christmas Carol and other novels.

That ominous possibility underscores words the Reverend James A. Forbes, Jr. the former senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church, uttered in a profile of him the Public Broadcasting Service program “Now with Bill Moyers” broadcast several years ago.

In it, Forbes, a son of the South and the first African American to lead the renowned church, warned of the “trends in American society away from parity, equality, and justice. God’s heart aches,” he declares, “and it is a sin to be silent.”

That was the moral of Charles Dickens’ timeless tale as well: that one must act to relieve the suffering of the poor and the least able among us.

That is why Scrooge’s pledge that “I will know Christmas in my heart” is heroic.

By Christmas, of course, I mean not the Christian holiday per se, but the spirit it brings to mind—of compassion toward the needy and of good will toward our fellow human beings—that is to be found in other religions as well, and which, beyond its connection to religious sentiment, is the core of human beings’ humanity.

This is what Ebenezer Scrooge understands and commits himself to. So should we.

Dickens concludes A Christmas Carol with these words, “Some people laughed to see the alteration in [Scrooge] … But he never heeded them. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough.”

Let us try to remember, compassion should always be in season.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.