Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, though offers Scrooge a different perspective. He sees Christmas time “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.” This view of time is more conceptual than literal. Part of the journey of Scrooge is to learn to think of time more in this way. So although Scrooge visits his time past, his time present and his time future, and is fundamentally changed by each of them, what really matters is that to be the complete ‘Scrooge’ he must live, as he says himself, “in the Past, the Present, and the Future”. So when Scrooge says, “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me” what he is really expressing is the need of mankind on his and her individual life journey to be at one with all aspects of their personal ‘selves’ and also in communion with all other ‘selves’, our “fellow-passengers to the grave”, as Fred describes them. If this new thinking is achieved time will be always be measured by love and not by the numbers on a wall clock.