Interpret What You Read – Scene 1
INSTRUCTIONS: Work with a partner. Imagine you are actors. Choose roles. Read aloud.
Scene 1 (Scrooge and Fred)
FRED: A merry Christmas, uncle!
SCROOGE: Bah! Humbug
FRED: Christmas a humbug, uncle! You don’t mean that, I am sure?
SCROOGE: I do. Forget merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer? If I had my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!
FRED: Uncle!
SCROOGE: Nephew, keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.
FRED: Keep it! But you don’t keep it.
SCROOGE: Let me leave it alone, then. No good may it do you! No good it has ever done you!
FRED: There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, — not only its religious part, but everything else — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to thank of people below them as if they really were fellow travelers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say yes to Christmas!
SCROOGE: I wonder why you don’t become a politician.
FRED: Don’t be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.
SCROOGE: No.
FRED: But why? Why?
SCROOGE: Why did you get married?
FRED: Because I fell in love.
SCROOGE: Because you fell in love! Goodbye!
FRED: No, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?
SCROOGE: Goodbye!
FRED: I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you like this. We have never fought before. I came, in honor of Christmas, and I will keep my Christmas spirit still. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!
SCROOGE: Bah!
FRED: And A Happy New Year!
SCROOGE: Humbug!