One of my favorite Christmas stories is the classic “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens.

It’s a slim little novel, especially in comparison to Dicken’s massive tomes like “Nicholas Nickelby” and “Great Expectations.” But it is packed full of lively character, from Ebenezer Scrooge and his long-suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit, to the ghost of Jacob Marley, to the corpse-robbing women to take everything from him, including his bed curtains, to the nameless gentlemen who try to solicit a Christmas donation from him, to the young lad Scrooge sends to get the prize turkey for Bob’s table. Each of them tells an essential part of the story in such an entertaining way.

And it’s such a great story — a greedy, miserly who gets a wake-up call from the other side about the meaning of Christmas. It’s a story of redemption, a stunning indictment of mid-19th Century England’s social inequities and an entertaining ghost story all wrapped into one.

I like reading “A Christmas Carol” every year, just as I like watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” and singing Christmas carols in church on Christmas day. It’s one of those things that make Christmas a little shinier, like tinsel on the tree.

And it is very adaptable. I don’t know how many movies have been based on it or how many actors have portrayed Scrooge, from Alastair Sims to Mr. Magoo, to Bill Murray in “Scrooged.” It’s such a great part.

It’s so adaptable, I toyed this week with the idea of writing a parody in which Donald Trump gets a visit from the ghost of Richard Nixon, who wants to give him advise on how to be presidential, from destroying all the tapes to playing nice with the Chinese. Other past presidents could  visit him — Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and others, to try to reason with Donald on how to handle himself in office.

But somehow, I couldn’t imagine Trump taking advice from any of them. Not even Lincoln. I think Trump likes being Trump too much to be anything else.

They say the office of the president changes the person who occupies it. No doubt it will have its effect on Trump as well, though I’m sure Trump will have an impact on the office as well.