I really enjoyed reading Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol this week. It was so interesting to compare my prior knowledge of the story from movies and videos to the actual 1943 text. I noticed that many of the movies and video retellings of the story omits some of the content in the Staves such as the ball that Scrooge goes to when he is a young man during his journey through Christmas Past. I enjoyed reading the text and diving deeper into the characterization of Scrooge while also gaining a Victorian insight into Christmas time in 1843. Since this text was written so long ago, I found it difficult to understand some of the Victorian jargon and references, such as 'Ali Baba' and a 'smoking bishop' in Stave 1. Due to the Victorian jargon, I found the annotation exercise to be extremely useful in deepening my understanding of the text and the Victorian socio-economic references such as the working houses, which was created by the Poor Laws of the 1840s. In terms of content, I also found the annotation of the term 'treadmill' to be very helpful and was surprised to learn about the literal use of a treadmill. When reading my classmate's content annotations I noticed that there were many allegories and symbols that I hadn't noticed during my first reading. I found the symbolization of Plenty's Horn to be quite interesting and seemed to be Dickens's way of commenting on the dire socio-economic struggles of the poor at the time and their severe undernourishment. These annotation exercises will be useful for the final assignment and I am glad that we are spending class time practicing and honing this skill.