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What The Dickens? Occupy Protest Inspires A New 'Christmas Carol' The San Francisco Mime Troupe's resident playwright, Michael Gene Sullivan, has re-imagined the 19th century holiday classic — with its familiar themes of labor unrest, joblessness and starvation — for the troubled 21st century. By Maria L. La Ganga December 17, 2011 Reporting from San Francisco -- Ebenezer Scrooge is a corporate banker, busy foreclosing on the hapless masses. Bob Cratchit and his beleaguered family live in a chilly tent in an anonymous Occupy encampment. The ghost of Christmas future sports a flowing black robe of taped-together trash bags and...

Just about everybody is in some way or another acquainted with the classic Charles Dickens story “A Christmas Carol”. A Christmas Carol was released in 1843 and it was essentially a story about the coldness of the human heart and the greed affiliated with it. The story’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge is so greedy and yet so wealthy, that he holds contempt for those who need money for charity, those who need money to survive, and those who want to spend money on gifts for other people. To Scrooge, everybody is more or less a being of consumption in the sense...

Ebenezer Scrooge, or just Scrooge, has often been portrayed as a miserly Conservative. However, a closer examination of the skinflint character from Charles Dickens's Christmas classic, A Christmas Carol, reveals that, on the contrary, Scrooge is a progressive. Here are eleven reasons why Scrooge is a progressive. 1) Scrooge relies on government programs to handle poverty. And the Union workhouses demanded Scrooge Are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full then? said Scrooge. 2.) He ignores private charities as the most effective way to help people in need. I help to support the establishments...

'Tis the season — every year at this time — for the various renderings of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. This year, the current animated version in the cinema — starring a computer-generated Jim Carrey in multiple roles — has won some plaudits for sticking with the spirit of the Dickens original. So it might come as some surprise to learn that when Dickens himself performed A Christmas Carol, he didn't do it as it's written. And during this holiday season, you can see the proof. In a small glass case at the New York Public Library, there sits...

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Ebenezer Scrooge begins the Christmas holiday with his usual miserly contempt, barking at his faithful clerk and his cheery nephew. But when the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come take him on an eye-opening journey revealing truths Old Scrooge is reluctant to face, he must open his heart to undo years of ill will before it's too late.

Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol opens today to a chorus of negative reviews and a rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A particularly harsh assessment comes from Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal: To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney’s 3-D animated version of “A Christmas Carol” is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey’s voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen...

A BBC poll of choral directors in the U.S. and U.K. finds Harold Darke's setting of "In The Bleak Midwinter" to be the best Christmas carol.

Type in any Christmas song and see what the little puppets do. Also, type in any non-Christmas song and you'll get a kick out of the response. They also get mixed up sometimes and sing the wrong one

It's Christmas time, and that means it's time to enjoy A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens' melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist. It's almost as sad as Star Wars, really. A Christmas Carol had someone other than that crypto-commie Dickens written it. So, for your holiday enjoyment, I submit these re-imaginings of A Christmas Carol, as other authors might have depicted it:

Bruce Bain doesn't attend church regularly, but nothing was going to keep him from showing up on the corner of 17th Street and Tremont Place on Friday night. "How can you have the Parade of Lights without the 'light of the world'?" he asked. "Christmas is a religious holiday." So the 56-year-old Englewood man joined hundreds of Christmas carolers from metro-area churches and sang along the Parade of Lights route. They sang on 15th Street. They sang at Court Place. And they sang at Colfax Avenue and Bannock Street. What they didn't do was raise hell. Yes, it was a...

OK Gang, What is, in your opinion, the finest version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"? It can be a TV, Movie, or animated version.

There's a radio station in Louisville, Kentucky, that -- many moons ago -- ran 'twisted' little songs to be sung to the tune of Christmas carols. We've always gotten a kick out of them, so I thought I'd post one of our favorites here for your enjoyment. Oh, and by the way, if any FReeper is familiar with these and has the words to more PLEASE let me know. I've lost several and would love to have them! (to the tune of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen) The restroom door said Gentlemen So I just went inside... The moment I...