A New Years Carol
It’s kind of funny that New Years is the resolution holiday when the greatest rehab story ever told happens a week before during Christmas. If there’s a bad habit you’re trying to break or a good one you’re trying to acquire (and if there’s just one you’re ahead of me) flip the calendar back to the week of December 25 and review a A Christmas Carol , which Charles Dickens wrote in 1843 because he needed the cash. A Christmas Carol is usually billed as a story of “redemption” which is a lovelier word than rehab but both just mean reclamation of one’s own life. And that’s what resolutions are made of. Scrooge’s addiction is clearly money, addiction here being defined as a fundamentalism about anything, whether it’s booze, sex, religion or “ Twilight .” It differs from a passion in that passion – for your work, your partner, for music or anything else –brings satisfaction at the end of the day. You might be consumed by it but in the end it’s not just a hiding place, whic