“The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible…”
“… the Ghost of Christmas Present appears to Scrooge as “a jolly giant” with dark brown curls. He wears a fur-lined green robe and on his head a holly wreath…”
Dickens’ description of the Ghost of Christmas Past sounded very visionary, ethereal and shape-shifting to me, so I thought I’d riff on the original description rather than the traditional interpretations:
“According to Dickens’ novel, the Ghost of Christmas Past appears to Scrooge as a white-robed, androgynous figure of indeterminate age. It has on its head a blazing light, reminiscent of a candle flame, and carries a metal cap, made in the shape of a candle extinguisher. While the ghost is often portrayed as a woman in dramatic adaptations of the story, Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Past only as “it”, and gives a curious description of it “being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away.”