Every year, I show my students the best movie version of “A Christmas Carol,” the 1984 20th Century Fox version starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. I do not show it as a way to kill time before the holiday break; I show it for the same reason that the Ghost of Christmas Past gives when Scrooge asks why he’s being visited.

“[F]or your welfare, Ebenezer.”

It’s the scene where Scrooge wakes up after believing himself dead that I want my students to see the most. I cannot imagine a single one of them watching Scrooge oh-so gleefully and oh-so gratefully realize he’s alive and not be deeply moved by it.

I know I can’t.

Additionally, I cannot imagine that anyone, even the most hard-hearted human being, can watch Scrooge remorsefully seek redemption, especially when apologizes to his nephew Fred for his offensive words about Christmas — as well as Fred himself! — and not be filled with a supercharged sense of hope.

I know I can’t. And I’ve seen this version of the movie at least twice a year for the last 25.

I can only hope that by watching Scrooge “wipe clean his slate” — by dining on Christmas Day with Fred, doubling Bod Cratchit’s salary the next, and serving as a second father to Tiny Tim subsequently — that my students realize that they do not have to be done in by past events, that they too can start anew.

Exposing them to that potentially life-changing possibility is a far better Christmas gift than what teachers often offer students: a couple of cookies or a candy cane. And although I’m not about to host a public screening of the movie and invite you, what I hope to bequeath to you today is that potentially life-changing possibility.

And there’s no better way to do so than to tell you about my father.

He’s on my mind, because I had feared I had lost him. The day of that freak November snowstorm, I received a call that he had suffered a stroke and was being taken by ambulance to the hospital.

Luckily, the diagnosis of a stroke was incorrect. He had suffered some sort of seizure, the cause of which has been undetermined to this day, and was discharged in two days.

Such a close call, however, caused me to consider all that he has gone through, and how so many times he has started anew.

First — and unbelievably — he quit playing minor league baseball when he was hitting .342. That’s right, .342!

His manager was told by the Chicago White Sox front office to move my dad to third base when they demoted a highly-touted bonus baby who also played center field. My father knew what that really meant and was perfectly content to return to Reading and work in a copper tubing plant, mostly because that allowed him to wed his high school sweetheart.

But lupus ended their life together 18 months later.

My dad struggled to make sense of life for a long time after that. But then he joined the Air Force, met my mom and married again.

Despite doing a physically demanding job at Carpenter Technology, a specialty steel man manufacturer, and usually for more than his scheduled 40 hours a week, he was content — until he severely slipped a disk and decided to tell no one for fear he would lose his job.

One night, the back pain became intense, radiated through the rest of his upper body, and gave him a goal. Pain be damned. He had to somehow leave the bed and lie on the downstairs sofa.

Why? He was determined not to die beside my mother.

After back surgery and the subsequent rehab, his doctors told him he could no longer do his old job. Luckily, he was a valued employee at Carpenter, so they created a job for him and called it expediter — except that position paid about half of his old one and offered no overtime.

Starting anew again, my father attacked the job with fervor, virtually eliminated the profit-robbing problem of processed steel being misplaced, and received raise after raise after raise.

Later, when he got sick and tired of the frequent pain in his back and the two or three times a year it would go out on him, he asked me — even though his doctors had already said otherwise — if there was a way to rehab his back by weightlifting. So we pieced together a program, and in three months he was comfortably handling 185 pounds for reps on the bench press — right about the time he reached 50!

Since then, he has had no trouble with his back whatsoever.

Now I could go on about how he rebounded after my mom’s sudden death or his open heart surgery, but I think one thing has already been established.

What he could have rightfully seen as roadblock after roadblock, he accepted graciously, almost gratefully, and never bitterly. The guy certainly knows how to start anew.

And unlike Scrooge, he’s never had four ghosts teach him how.