A Christmas Carol

A Short Allegory for the Christmas Season

Author’s Note

This is a fictional allegory inspired by medieval records, seasonal storytelling, and themes of learning, legacy, and renewal. It does not depict real events, real individuals, or comment on any ongoing matters. It is a work of imagination only.

🕯️ Stave One — The Ghost of Christmas Past

“The Lost Folio”

It was said that in the reign of a long-departed king, a set of protections was once granted to scholars of an ancient place of learning. Frail in body perhaps, yet fierce in purpose, these early scholars carried the light of knowledge through an uncertain realm. Their protection, according to legend, symbolised a covenant between authority and learning, a quiet promise that wisdom should walk safely through the land.

But time, ever the mischievous clerk, muddled the memory of where these protections were recorded. For more than a century a key folio was believed to rest under one name, only for later generations to find that history had quietly placed it elsewhere.

So the tale tells of a scholar who followed a faint trail through dust, parchment, and candle soot. Working with keepers of old records, he helped realign what time had skewed.

The tale even crossed the ocean in its wanderings, pausing for a moment in the vast cities of the New World, where maples flared crimson in the fall and learning wore a different shape.

One winter morning, he carried a parchment thought correct. When a deeper misplacement emerged, he returned once more, guided only by duty and the desire to set the past in order.

Thus the Ghost of Christmas Past stepped from the shadowed stacks, lantern raised, to whisper:

“Remember who you once were, and the duty you believed in.”

🌙 Stave Two — The Ghost of Christmas Present

“The Scholar and the Silence”

Now we step into the Present, where fact and symbol sit side by side like two guests at a winter feast who have yet to speak.

Here lies the restored folio, no longer misplaced, but newly understood. Archivists, scholars, and distant readers glance over old records with seasonal curiosity.

Yet beyond this quiet chamber, our allegory widens.

In this tale, observers murmur; institutions watch through frosted panes; and the imagined Royals of this story appears briefly, as folklore often allows, to take note of an ancient page brought gently home.

At the centre stands our scholar, not as a challenger or reformer, for this is fiction, but as a symbol of quiet perseverance, reminding us that history speaks most clearly when modern voices falter.

The Ghost of Christmas Present leans in and whispers:

“Every age reveals the duties it has forgotten.

Every scholar shows the duty that remains.”

And in the stillness that follows, something shifts. Not ghosts of people, but the spirits of knowledge themselves drift between the shelves, soft, watchful, and lingering like candle smoke. They do not speak; they do not command. They simply observe, as if waiting for those who have forgotten their duty to remember what was once entrusted to them.

🔮 Stave Three — The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

“The Record and the Reckoning”

The final Ghost arrives without sound, as all futures do.

No blame is cast.

No verdict is rendered.

Allegories do not judge.

The Ghost merely reveals possibilities, crossroads faced by any institution when confronting its own foundations.

In this vision, scrolls lie open upon winter desks, illuminated by the soft glow of inquiry. Storytellers, observers, and chroniclers watch from afar. Analysts reflect on how trust, once unsettled, might one day be restored.

The Ghost poses a single question, addressed not to any place or person, but to the universal human condition:

“What becomes of a foundation when the memory of its duties fades?”

🎄 Stave Four — The Final Scene

And so the story returns to a solitary figure walking through winter streets, parchment in hand.

He corrected a long-misunderstood page.

He restored a small piece of forgotten heritage.

He acted not in rebellion, but in remembrance.

In our tale, the restored folio stands clear at last.

History, in its quiet way, realigns.

The scholar’s lantern glows with renewed purpose.

Old protections, long obscured, rise again in meaning.

This is not upheaval.

It is heritage restored.

It is Dickens for the modern age.

And as winter settles over the ancient city, the story closes with a final thought:

“When trust drifts, memory returns.

When duty dims, history relights the flame.”

Thus ends A Christmas Carol —

an allegory of past, present, and future,

and a reminder that every institution, in every age, must choose:

"To honour the foundations it inherited

or forget the promise that once defined it."