In Defense of Ebenezer Scrooge: Why Entrepreneurs and Business People Hate Christmas

“Bah! Humbug!” is how Ebenezer Scrooge famously responds to other people’s excitement about Christmas.

For over 175 years, people have interpreted his words from Charles Dickens’s well-tread holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, to mean Mr. Scrooge is a crotchety old man who hates the “holiday spirit.” But those people aren’t entrepreneurs. And they don’t run businesses.

Mr. Scrooge, in contrast, is an entrepreneur and business owner. By all accounts, he’s a successful one, too, even being described by Dickens in the third paragraph of the story as “an excellent man of business.”

As an entrepreneurship educator, I feel obligated to take this opportunity to defend Ebenezer Scrooge because I think he’s gotten a bad wrap. Frankly, I agree with Ebenezer Scrooge: I hate Christmas, too. Bah! Humbug!

Before any Christmas ghosts show up to terrify me into seeing the error of my ways, let me explain why I hate Christmas. I know I’m not the only entrepreneur who does. In fact, lots of entrepreneurs and business people hate Christmas for the same reason: we can’t get anything done!

On Christmas, the world stops. Markets close, businesses shut down, consumers stay home so everyone can spend time with their families, exchange gifts, and eat themselves into food comas. While that’s great for them -- and, to be clear, I enjoy it on a personal level -- it's not good for business. When the world is shut down for a holiday, people aren't buying things, and that means entrepreneurs can't make any sales.

Now remember, when you own a business, being able to sell things is the core of what you do; it’s how you make money. And even though I don’t believe money is the only thing that matters in this world, I do recognize that an entrepreneur like Ebenezer Scrooge needs money in order to do things like pay Bob Cratchit a salary (little though it may be) so that Bob Cratchit can, in turn, feed Tiny Tim and the rest of his family.

We should also recognize that Scrooge's acerbic attitude toward Christmas probably isn't purely about Christmas itself. If one day without sales each year is going to wreck a business, that business probably isn't a good business. Instead, the bigger problem is that longer business slowdown caused by the “holiday spirit.” The slowdown begins a few days before Thanksgiving and doesn’t end until the second week of the new year. From the end of November through the beginning of January, the only things people seem to buy are turkeys, presents, and plane tickets. That’s great if you’re a consumer products retailer, but it’s terrible for lots of other people in the business community.

Instead of simply assuming Scrooge is a nasty old man who only cares about his money, what if his scrooge-ness is a byproduct of something more benevolent? What if the nearly-two-month decline in revenues around the Christmas holidays every year makes it difficult to sustain his business, and that creates anxiety for him because he knows how many people beyond himself rely on it?

Plus, we can't forget that the holidays don't just decrease Scrooge's his revenues decrease. They also increase his expenses. Thanks to what Dickens tells us, we already know Scrooge is having to pay for the coal to heat his office in the cold weather. Surely that’s not cheap. And what about the expenses Dickens doesn’t write about? For example, presumably Scrooge has clients. Maybe to keep those clients from switching to other money lenders, Scrooge has to send them Christmas gifts. The costs of all those gift cards and boxes of Christmas cookies adds up!

We also can’t forget that we meet Scrooge after he’s been in business for decades. Maybe in his earlier years he was hosting office Christmas parties, giving employees the entire week off, and sending them home with a nice, fat Christmas bonus. What if his holiday kindness didn’t help anything? What if it made the work environment less productive? People started showing up late and leaving early because they thought “Scrooge is my buddy… we exchanged presents and drank wine together… he won’t fire me if I slip out for an extended lunch a couple times per week.” Maybe Scrooge concluded that being overly generous during the holidays was bad for business. Since he’s ultimately responsible to his employees, customers, and investors for keeping his business running, maybe he had to make some difficult sacrifices. Heck, maybe Scrooge loved the holidays, and it hurt him so much to prioritize his business instead of holiday generosity that he uses his miserliness as a defense mechanism to help him cope with the sacrifices of running a company during the holidays.

The point is, A Christmas Carol doesn’t tell us very much about Ebenezer Scrooge as an entrepreneur, nor does it seem to care much about the responsibilities and obligations associated with running businesses. So I feel like it's my responsibility as an entrepreneurship educator to point out the reality of Scrooge's job. Specifically, I think we all need to cut Scrooge some slack by reminding ourselves that the needs of running a business are often at odds with the “holiday spirit.” Scrooge is a businessperson, revenues dry up over the holidays, and that’s not something to get excited about when you’re responsible for the well being of hundreds or even thousands of other people.

Running a business is already hard enough. When something makes it harder, entrepreneurs who get annoyed aren't bad people. It's the opposite. It means the entrepreneurs care about all the people they're serving -- customers, employees, investors, communities, etc. -- and that's a good thing.

Don't miss another article! Subscribe to my newsletter here!

Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his awesome podcast, Web Masters.