Searching around for a similar quote from Dickens ...
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round...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.
- Charles Dickens
To be sure we have the Scrooge base covered;
'Out upon merry Christmas What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer... If I could work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly, 'every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' upon his lips should be boiled with his won pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should'
-'Scrooge'
After his change of heart ...
“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”
Richest blessings and a wonderful Christmas to you brother and your family.
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
- Charles Dickens, Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol
Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.
- Mary Ellen Chase
