Carol for Another Christmas by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page B

from Melody. “Family deaths, too. Since my grandma died at Christmas five years ago, I keep noticing how many people get divorced or lose a mom or dad or a kid at Christmas. And it seems like there’s always some big disaster like a flood or an earthquake or a fire that wipes out a bunch of people every year.”
    â€œCrime’s worse, too. In fact, I think we can agree we’d all be better off without it,” David growled. “So let’s get out of here. I wore my HO-cubed sweatshirt tonight and I’m sweltering.”
    â€œYou can’t be sweltering,” Sheryl told him sternly. “Here we’re as much ghosts as Mr. Scrooge. Right?”
    â€œHe’s real suggestible, Sheryl; you know that,” Melody said with a kindly look at the marketing manager.
    Scrooge had wandered away from them and was listening to more disembodied Christmas music coming from a variety of cards, bell ornaments, and lights. None of it had a very good tone, but he thought it was a lovely idea. Perhaps Doug Banks could have made it sound more like music if he had lived long enough, in the same way he had improved the voice on his sister’s doll.
    â€œWell, I for one am disappointed,” Sheryl said. “I thought we were going to have profound revelations here, and all we did was come back to the sale I avoided the first time.”
    â€œI wish I had,” Melody said. “If I hadn’t needed the money so bad, I’d never have taken the job. All those guys who thought they were being cute trying to get me to sit on their laps while they told me what they wanted for Christmas. Gruesome. ”
    Scrooge suspected from the expressions on the faces of many of the other people in elf costumes that Melody’s feelings were shared by her coworkers. Besides, unfamiliar as he was with how this city customarily celebrated Christmas (except for the glimpses he’d had into Monica Banks’s past), this setting lacked the proper feeling entirely. There were no street decorations, no wreaths on doors, no Christmassy feel at all to the sale.
    All he saw around him were tawdry trinkets made, according to these people, possibly by slave labor. Baskets full of shopworn merchandise. Lights that blinked furiously enough to give anyone a headache, if the tinny carols that came from no musical instrument ever invented by God or man had not already done so. Unseasonable weather and harried people. He and Christmas both were completely out of place on this hot summer day in this hot little indoor village within a city. The air was not as sooty or foggy as his London, but it was somehow less wholesome for being confined.
    Harald and Miriam caught his eye and drew the attention of the others to him. “Hey, you guys, I think Mr. Scrooge is about ready to say The Line.”
    â€œI beg your pardon?” Scrooge said.
    â€œYou know,” Miriam prompted, “ the line, your famous one—first word, sounds like a lamb?”
    â€œBah!” said Scrooge, who’d absolutely adored guessing games since that first Christmas, when, while being haunted into attending his nephew’s party, he’d started playing Scattergories.
    Miriam and the others were making encouraging motions with their hands, “That’s it. ‘Bah!’ and . . . help him out, gang. I think he agrees with us about Christmas in July. Christmas in July, Mr. Scrooge. Whaddaya think?”
    â€œI think that while the spirit of Christmas should be in one’s heart all year long, the celebration of Christmas proper should bloody well stay in December, where it belongs, and Christmas in July is nothing but—”
    And one and all chorused together, “Humbug!”
    After that, they had a much merrier time. They were laughing at everything, laughing so much they would, had anyone else been able to hear or see them, have been thrown out by one of the uniformed guards.
    Sheryl brought them all back