Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
The first sentence of A Christmas Carol is “Marley was dead: to begin with.” It's a terrible way to start a story about Christmas. But A Christmas Carol isn't great because it's a great story. In fact, A Christmas Carol is a flimsy story. The characters are mostly clichés. Scrooge is a parody of miserly behavior. He is not only against Christmas, he is against love. He is also against charity, kindness, and even heat, preferring to keep his coal locked up rather than warm the office with it. Scrooge lives in darkness and gloom. “The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.”
In contrast, Tiny Tim — the blessed little cripple and son of Scrooge's employee — seems to bear no resentment to the world at all. His love for everyone knows no bounds, despite the fact that Scrooge has done everything in his power to keep the Cratchit family in misery. God bless us, every one, and so forth.
Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He's so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don't buy it.
More Scroogish stuff here.