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To hear Philip Palmer, the literary curator at the Morgan Library & Museum tell it, the story behind the writing of "A Christmas Carol" sounds, well, like something out of Charles Dickens. It is October 1843 and Dickens’ debts are mounting. The 31-year-old author has moved his growing family into a new home in London, a bigger house with more servants. His father and his brothers keep taking out loans using his famous name. He is forced to take out ads in newspapers warning creditors not to loan his father any more money. By 1843, Dickens was already known for...

The COVID-19 vaccine shots won’t be enough to combat the omicron variant, according to Ugur Sahin, the CEO of vaccine developer BioNTech. “We must be aware that even triple-vaccinated are likely to transmit the disease,” he told French daily Le Monde. “It is obvious we are far from 95 percent effectiveness that we obtained against the initial virus,” he added. He added that the vaccine is now 70% to 75% effective against stopping COVID-19 infection. RELATED Omicron variant is resistant to vaccines, antibody treatments and boosters, study says Can the Moderna COVID booster shot defeat the omicron variant? Sahin said...

Some say that Dickens is the father of the modern Christmas celebration—a tradition that was disappearing at the time he wrote the story. His portrayal of a Victorian snow-filled holiday celebrated with wassail, caroling, and families gathered around the table to eat the Christmas goose, perpetuated the secular Christmas celebration, which many Americans now enjoy. Yet, it was far more than a holiday tale. A Christmas Carol was a powerful, almost subliminal, message of Christian values and morality—though Jesus, God and the New Testament are barely alluded to in the story. How many readers knew that Dickens was an unconventional...

Bah Humbug. Bah Ha-Ha. Bah Horror. When it comes to Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” how do you like your Scrooge served? Are you partial to the dramatic British version starring Alastair Sim, which has brought a tear to many a viewer’s eyes? Or maybe you prefer your Scrooge spiked with a dose of merry mischief like Bill Murray delivers in “Scrooged.” “A Christmas Carol” performed by puppets never fails to charm, as evidenced by the huge popularity of “The Muppet Christmas Carol.” It’s hard to resist the scenery-chewing Scrooges of George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart in their respective...

Christmas Carol Flash Mob at Chick-fil-A Lake Brandon Village in Brandon, Florida.

I shared my review of The Man Who Invented Christmas last week (I liked it.) In addition to screening the film, which was based off a book by author Les Standiford, Townhall also had the chance to sit down in a roundtable discussion with actor Dan Stevens and Director Bharat Nalluri at last weekend's premiere in New York City.Stevens, famous for lighting up the screen both in Downton Abbey and Beauty and the Beast, is equally charming and entertaining as Charles Dickens. In our discussion, he explained the true story of how the author, down on his luck after three...

The first link is to Jussi Bjorling, the greatest tenor who ever lived, singing O Holy Night. It is in Swedish, but you can think of the English as he sings. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEi9IDV3BzA This second link is to Leontyne Price singing the same carol. Both of them have voices that would make a bishop kick in a stained glass window. Merry Christmas to my fellow Freepers!

A Romanian television station is under fire after broadcasting an anti-Semitic Christmas Carol performance earlier in December, according to United Press International. The state-operated TVR3 Verde, a channel directed to rural communities, began broadcasting December 3 with a program that included a Christmas carol with anti-Semitic lyrics. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency revealed the horrific lyrics Wednesday, which include the statements, “The kikes, damn kikes, Holy God would not leave the kike alive, neither in heaven nor on earth, only in the chimney as smoke, this is what the kike is good for, to make kike smoke through the chimney on...

Every year during the Christmas season I replace my regular column with a story I wrote years ago. It’s totally fictitious, but there are bits and pieces of autobiographical material here and there that reflect on my earliest remembrances of Christmas time in North Carolina. We always have a get together with family and friends at our house on Christmas Eve night. We share some food and drink and then sit around the den in a circle and everybody gets a turn to say whatever is on their minds followed by me reading Luke's version of the Christmas story. Several...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpS0vG3Mkr4&fb_source=message

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.