AN~ Like last time, I mostly buffed this chapter up.
Scrooge has become afraid of sleeping for a long time. Not since the Christmas incident, exactly, but since the other ghosts found out about it. During the day they're just annoying- he can ignore them, then.
At night he has no choice.
Every night, when he falls asleep, they're there. Haunting him. Telling him how he needs to get in the spirit of Pancake Day (how exactly can he have ruined pancake day?). Pushing him to give his employees the day off (if he gave Tim the day of for every one of these holidays, he might as well just close up shop).
It ought to have been enough that he was immortalized in slang as a Christmas-hater, even though he was one of the holiday's most cheerful celebrants now. but no, he had to be punished with other ghosts.
And the things were tireless, on top of that. Dead people didn't have to worry about sleeping themselves, or eating, or going to the bathroom, or making appointments or something like that. All they had to do was sit in his waiting room, annoying him, making trouble for Tim, and taking up space for paying customers. Waiting for him to fall asleep on their holiday.
Sometimes, if he could stay up past midnight, it would hold them at bay. Usually it wouldn't. And he'd have to sit through his worst days, then see who would say something bad about him on the coming day, and then see how he'd die on that day. He'd had some pretty bad memorial days. And it was getting a little tiring dreaming about his death over three hundred times a year. It got a little old after a while.
But it never got less frightening.
So he drank a lot of coffee, and tried to stay up as late as he could every night (because there were so many minor holidays, it was practically one ever day). And he lived with it, waiting for things to be over.