Some people I know have a favorite film or TV version of A Christmas Carol.
These people are otherwise smart, friendly, tasteful folk, but boy are they wrong about that.
There is no good version.
I despised A Christmas Carol forever and ever amen because I grew up watching everybody and their brother’s rendition of the show. I hated them all. I assumed it was because the story itself was trite and overwrought. No. It was because someone should have had the sense to strictly forbid the inevitable evisceration of an excellent book.
There are books out there that have been written as books because the written word allows you to do things that cannot be done in a play or on film. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of those books.
Do you love yourself? You should. Jesus loves you, so you should too. And therefore, since you are visiting this blog and thus we know you are a literate person of a certain age, you owe yourself the gift of reading the book.
It’s a short book. Unlike other books by Charles Dickens, you can enjoy this book. Yes, even you. Even though we all know you hated both pages of Great Expectations that you pretended to read while your English teacher was looking. Ordinary people who have the sense to mostly avoid Dickens should, nonetheless, read A Christmas Carol.
It’s an excellent story, and it’s out of copyright so you can even read it for free (though I prefer paper myself).
Here it is at Project Gutenberg.
Here’s a review of a nice library book I found, Walking Dickens’ London, that you might enjoy to go with. I see looking over the review that I recommend this book as a convenient way to get perspective on Rerum Novarum. If you double-love yourself, of course you’re reading that, too. But A Christmas Carol is a tad more accessible to most of the kids.
No one keeps Christmas better than Scrooge. A Christmas Carol bookplate courtesy of Wikimedia [public domain].