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like a drink or a snack?”
    I glanced over at the concession stand. “Maybe some popcorn.”
    “Okay. Wait, it’s not popcorn, it’s kettle corn.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “You’ll like it,” he said. “It has sugar.”
    “How do you know I like sugar?”
    “You eat it on your salad,” he said.
    We got a small box of kettle corn and climbed the stairs to the theater’s entrance. The theater was in the round, and, not surprisingly, we had good seats, though in a theater that small I’m not sure there were any bad ones.
    After we had sat down I ate some kettle corn and said, “Picking up our tickets at Will Call reminded me of something dumb I did.”
    “Tell me.”
    “When I first started at ICE, Mark, he’s the owner, sent me over to Modern Display to pick up some plastic display holders for a convention we were doing. He said to get them from Will Call. When I got there I went up to the sales counter and asked for Mr. Call. There were two men there, and they both looked at me with funny expressions. One asked the other, ‘Do you know a Call here?’ He said, ‘No.’ Then he said to me, ‘I’m sorry, there’s no Mr. Call here. Do you know his first name?’ I said, ‘I think it’s William or Will. My boss just said to pick it up from Will Call.’ They laughed for about five minutes before someone told me why.”
    Nicholas laughed. “I did that exact same thing once.”
    “Really?”
    “No, I’m not that dumb.”
    I threw a piece of kettle corn at him.
    “So here’s some trivia for you,” he said. “Did you know that the original name that Dickens gave his book was much longer? Its real title is A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas . A carol is a song or a hymn, so the abbreviated title doesn’t really make sense.”
    “I’ve never thought of that,” I said.
    “It’s a much more influential book than most people realize. In a way, Dickens invented Christmas.”
    “I’m pretty sure Christmas existed before Dickens was born.”
    “True, but before A Christmas Carol , Easter was the biggest Christian celebration. December twenty-fifth was no more consequential than Memorial Day. In fact, the colony of Massachusetts had a law on the books prohibiting the celebration of the holiday. Christmas was considered a pagan celebration, and observing Christmas might cost you a night in the stocks.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Mostly the timing, I suspect. The reason we celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fifth has nothing to do with Christ’s birth. In fact, we have no idea when Christ was born. The twenty-fifth was designated as Jesus’s birthday by Pope Julius I, in order to attract new Roman members to the church because they were already celebrating the day in honor of the pagan god of agriculture. Which is why Christmas not so coincidentally takes place near the winter solstice.”
    “I had no idea,” I said.
    “Also interesting is that historically, Dickens and Friedrich Engels were contemporaries. They were both in Manchester, England, at the same time and they were equally repulsed by the workers’ living conditions.”
    “Who is Friedrich Engels?”
    “He was Karl Marx’s inspiration for the Communist Manifesto. The early nineteenth century was a dark time for the workingman. The majority of the children born to working-class parents died before the age of five. So while Engels wrote about a political revolution, Dickens was writing about a different kind of revolution—a revolution of the heart. He was writing about the things he wrote about in his other books, the welfare of children and the need for social charity.”
    “How do you know all this?”
    “I’m a lawyer,” he said, which again made no sense to me.
    “What does that have to do with—”
    “Shh,” he said, laying his finger across his lips. “The play is starting.”
    As the lights came up at the end of the first half, just before Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to