Ebenezer Scrooge is a man who everyone fears. He sits in his office and counts money all day. He makes his assistant work on Christmas, and he himself works many hours trying to make more money. He lives a very lonely life, seeming to have no friends except for his money. He refuses to give any money to the poor and he hates Christmas. When he hears people saying, “Merry Christmas!” he yells, “Bah Humbug.” The night of Christmas Eve, three Christmas ghosts visit Scrooge in bed. The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future take Scrooge to see how other people are spending their Christmas, and Scrooge is touched. On Christmas morning, he wakes up a changed man, shouting, “Merry Christmas,” and he buys the largest turkey available to send to his assistant’s home.
This story taught me the importance of family and friendship. It taught me to avoid letting money take over my life. You can make all the money in the world and be the loneliest man in the world if you don’t have anyone to share it with. When Scrooge changed, he was very happy even though he was giving away all kinds of money. He didn’t care how much money he had, he only cared about the people around him.
The story teaches that money is not the point of Christmas. Often times, people forget what the holiday is all about because they get all caught up worrying about what they will get for Christmas and how big their Christmas bonus will be. Stores love Christmas because it is the busiest shopping season of the year. They think of Christmas in terms of money and they continue to make the holiday last longer and longer by starting to sell Christmas items as early as the beginning of November now. People start to think that Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman are the heroes of Christmas, they forget that the holiday is celebrating Jesus’ birth
A few years ago, my family and I went skiing at Breckenridge, Colorado. My brother and I decided that we wanted to be challenged, so we told my dad that we would meet him for lunch and we took off. We took the highest lift up and then we hiked for another thirty minutes until we reached the very peak of the mountain. At the top, the scenery was beautiful, and it was scary clinging on to such a steep slope, staring down at the bottom of the mountain, thousands of feet below us. When we finally built up the courage to ski down, I clumsily tripped and went sliding down the steep slope. I slid for several hundred feet down the icy slope. I knew that I had to stop myself before I slid into the boulders below, so I tried to dig my boots into the ice, but the ice was too hard. Finally, my boot hit a small rock just a few feet before the jagged rocks began. I was finally safe, and I realized how close to death I really was. Just a few feet past where I stopped was a pile of jagged rocks and a ten foot cliff. If I hadn’t stopped where I did, I surely would have gone off the cliff, and could have suffered very serious injuries. After, I hiked back up the slope and recovered my skis, I skied very carefully down the rest of the mountain and met my dad. For the rest of the trip, I was too scared to ski anything steep, and I just skied with my dad.
I learned that I do have limits, and that I am not as good of a skier as I thought. I was too overconfident when I started to ski down the slope and I wasn’t thinking about the little things like turning my skis. Now I know that it is more important to be alive than to be a hotshot skier who can ski the steepest slope on the mountain. I should stop trying to impress people because one time I could get seriously hurt and then I will just look foolish. Before this time, I hadn’t fallen in a couple of years, and never this seriously. I had begun to think that skiing wasn’t dangerous. After this fall, I learned a new respect for how dangerous skiing can be and to not take things for granted.