"... I live in a world of fools ... Merry Christmas after merry Christmas. What is Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money, a time for finding yourself a year older and now an hour richer? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own Christmas pudding and burned with a stake of holly through his heart! ... There is only one thing in the world more ridiculous than Merry Christmas and that is the thought of a home with love as its center.... Merry Christmas! ... Friends! ... Love! ... What could be more idiolic? Bah! Humbug!"

So says Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. We cringe at such sharp and cruel statements. They slam against us like the direct hit of a snowball square in th…