CHERRY-CHEEKED APPLES

Good morning! Continuing with our look at a classic tale, Mitch Glazer wrote in his introduction:
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Admit it. Most of us have never actually read A Christmas Carol. We’ve seen the Alastair Sim film or the Mr. Magoo cartoon or The Muppet Christmas Carol or Bill Murray’s classic Scrooged. (Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, I co-wrote the latter.) Somehow we just know the story: the meanest man on earth, the dead partner, the three ghosts, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, “God bless Us, Every One!” It is part of our holiday DNA. One of the two core Christmas tales. A Christmas Carol transcends the page with the power and inevitability of myth.

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A Christmas Carol: In Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, 1843

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling.

Scrooge anticipates meeting Ghost Two.

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Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.

A feast for a miser who had earlier dined on gruel.

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It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is as jolly as Scrooge is taciturn. I have no idea what significance the rusty scabbard holds.
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I’ll return tomorrow with the travels of Scrooge and this ghost. Please join me!