“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart,” Scrooge tells his nephew in the opening bars of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol.

Now tell that to Leah Xuereb’s parents, brother and close relatives who can now spend a very happy Christmas with the four-year-old who has spent the past 12 months battling one of the most severe forms of stomach cancer.

Or say that to the courageous breast cancer victims who, notwithstanding their ordeal and side effects of treatment, still decided to remain attractive in all senses to their loved ones. They even agreed to participate in a Feel Good, Look Good fashion show last summer.

Mother-of-two Christine Mifsud, 32, is another role model for those who prefer to look at the positive things in life rather than just the bad and sad news. She learnt to cope with life and raise her daughters notwithstanding losing her sight to diabetes.

Talk to such people and they will tell you that the pain and anguish they and their families experienced made them realise how beautiful life is. How the quest for what is good and healthy – sane (as in correct, sensible, sober, chaste) would perhaps be a better word – gave them the stamina and the determination to fight and live the good life.

To us mere mortals, the story of Scrooge keeps repeating itself in every corner of the word, in every household, in all walks of life.

Yet, the event that the whole world – and not just Christians – celebrates tonight should give us hope and put us on the right track to realise that mankind destroys itself when it refuses to acknowledge itself and accept to be tolerant, inclusive and humble.

For Christians this is the beginning of the story leading to salvation. The birth of the son of a virgin, young mother who would grow up to offer everybody the opportunity to eventually join the Kingdom of Heaven.

But even for non-believers, the event brings joy. For a birth is a new beginning, with its promises of hope, success and reward, a new life that, true, will have its ups as well as its downs. But mutual respect, dignity and tolerance can win the day and surmount all obstacles.

In the Bible the angels sing: “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace to those on whom His favour rests”.

This is how John Lennon puts it in his hit Happy Christmas (War Is Over “And so happy Christmas (war is over). For black and for white (if you want it). For yellow and red ones (war is over). Let’s stop all the fight (now).”

Young Leah, enjoying a wonderful Christmas, the ladies who fought breast cancer and won and Ms Mifsud, who proved that where there is a will there is a way, are some of the living examples of hope and of man’s ability to win over pain and sorrow.

They may well be the spirits of Christmas present that will propel us to Christmas future and, like Scrooge, in the last stave of Dickens’s masterpiece, cry out: “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!”

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