There may have been something to the apparition in the clock after all: The shade of “Smokey Joe” Marley awakens the slumbering Scrooge, disturbing Ebenezer down to the very marrow in his bones. Marley is accompanied by Joe’s Girls, the ghosts of girls who lost fiancés to their avarice. With sounds of lamentation and regret, Marley and the Girls warn Scrooge that he is to be haunted by three spirits, lest he become doomed like Marley, captive, bound, and double-bonded. On the stroke of one, the first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, comes to visit Scrooge, to show him as he used to be, Christmas Eve, 1922. Christmas Past and Marley present Scrooge with a vision of himself there as a bright young man, at the party thrown by his generous employer Fezziwig. First, we meet Marilyn—the love of Scrooge’s life—as he first won her heart that night at Fezziwig’s party. Then, the furniture is thrown aside for the party and the band starts to play a wild tune. Then, seven years later, Christmas Eve, 1929: While once it seemed they were meant to be together, Ebenezer’s increasing avarice has come between Marilyn and Ebenezer. She tells him that she loves him as he once was, but that he has become a changed man with a changed face, a man who has lost his conviction for anything but “Gain.” They part, and Scrooge is left alone to continue his Christmas journey.

Brooke Geffrey-Bowler | Bob Williams Photography

Prologue: 1948