Ok, now first of all, How the Grinch Stole Christmas has a wonderful
moral. I'm NOT criticizing the moral; what I am criticizing is its
execution. Please let me explain.
If you don't know what the
story is about here's a recap. There's a microscopic town on a
snowflake and all of the microscopic townspeople love Christmas. And
every time they celebrate Christmas, they're cheerful and loud, which
irritates this guy named, "The Grinch" who lives on a mountain nearby.
Now the story says that the Christmas festivities annoy him because The
Grinch doesn't have enough goodness in his heart, but that's one of the
points that I'm going to debate so for the sake of argument let's just
go with that for the rest of the recap. So on Christmas eve, while
everyone's asleep, The Grinch steals all the decorations and all the
Christmas presents and takes them to his house. Then he goes to sleep
and when he wakes up on Christmas day to everyone singing. Now
everyone's singing because according to the story, those people believe
that 'Christmas is about love and not presents,' which is another point
that I'm going to debate. Then The Grinch has an epiphany that
Christmas isn't about presents and it's about love and he brings all the
presents back and everyone forgives him.
Now the story in
itself is a nice sentiment of someone having a change of heart, but it
has some flaws. The first flaw is that the story claims that The Grinch
is evil just because he doesn't like the Christmas cheer; I disagree, I
think he just wants some peace and quiet and the noise and lights
bother him, also just a reminder, the people in the town are microscopic
and live on a snowflake so he might not be able to move further away
from that, he also has a dog, who he's nice to that loves him so he does
have kindness in his heart. He's just antisocial, which is a bad thing
to be, but —whether or not its' bad to be anti social— is not one of
the main points of the story.
Now my second point is that
when the people wake up and realize that their presents are gone,
they're singing cheerful songs. Now maybe they actually see Christmas
as being about kindness, or maybe they're going through the first of the
five stages of loss, as hypothesized by Kübler-Ross, a Swiss
psychatrist. That stage of loss happens to be denial; those towns
people could be singing cheerful songs NOT because —they believe that
Christmas is about kindness and not materialism and/or consumerism,— but
because they're in —denial that the gifts and decorations are gone—,
and they're trying to convince themselves that the gifts are still
there.
So my conclusion of this is that The Grinch is NOT a
bad guy; he just wants to be left alone and that through the whole
story, —the towns people did in fact believe that Christmas is about
commercialism and not kindness,— which is DEFINITELY NOT —what the story
states has happened. This means that The Grinch wasn't a buy guy who
turned into a good guy; The Grinch was an antisocial guy who became a
more social guy because he thought that the townspeople weren't
materialistic. It also means that it is debatable whether or not the
townspeople deserved for their Christmas gifts and decor to be stolen.
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