Five Real-Life Historical Scrooges
Charles Dickens might have invented Christmas, but he didn’t invent guys who try to ruin it. For as long as we’ve honored Baby Jesus by politely avoiding any acknowledgement of him, there have been people pooping on the quasi-religious party. People like…
Oliver Cromwell
Under Cromwell’s leadership as Lord Protector, Christmas was banned for several years in the mid-1600s in England, Ireland and Scotland. To be fair, his objection was to celebrations that took the Christ out of Christmas, but it extended to sending soldiers into the streets, confiscating food that looked too good for 17th-century England and thus must have been intended for a Christmas feast. No wonder they put his head on a spike.
Brock Chisholm
Even the stodgiest rationalist will concede that there’s nothing wrong with believing in Santa Claus, unless that stodgy rationalist is Brock Chisholm. As the first director-general of the World Health Organization, Chisholm suffered no fools, and he considered encouraging children to believe in Santa Claus very foolish indeed. In what must have been a huge digression in a 1945 speech about raising children to foster peace, he insisted that the dirty Santa-writers would “become the kind of man who develops a sore back when there is a tough job to do and refuses to think realistically when war threatens.” People around the world were outraged enough to demand his resignation, but you have to admit, he would have been good to have around during COVID.
Reverend Paul Nedergaard
In 1958, in the Danish tradition of selling limited-edition envelope seals at Christmastime to raise money for charity, one organization released a seal bearing an image of Santa Claus. Reverend Nedergaard took exception to that, encouraging people to boycott the seal featuring “a symbol of a pagan goblin.” Did we mention it was a children’s welfare agency? In a blistering op-ed, a Copenhagen journalist wrote, “We don’t believe a goblin will hurt the sale of Christmas seals — but a clergyman can harm the good cause,” then dropped whatever they used as mics in 1958.
Dr. Seuss
Any of these figures could have inspired Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, to come up with the Grinch, but his inspiration was actually himself. In 1956, he realized, “Something had gone wrong with Christmas … or more likely with me. So I wrote the story about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost.” Even then, he struggled with getting too heavy, spending three months trying to figure out an ending without sounding “like a second-rate preacher or some bible thumper.”
John Elwes
You can call someone a Scrooge metaphorically, but politician John Elwes was probably Dickens’ inspiration for the heartless miser. Interestingly, although Elwes was known in his time as one cheap bastard, it was only because he refused to spend money on himself, his fellow members of parliament joking that he couldn’t be a turncoat because he only owned one suit. But he freely lent money he refused to collect and invested in terrible business ideas out of the goodness of his heart. That was probably post-ghost, though.