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.”