Before Bahumbug, before Christmas movies and before gift-giving traditions, the holiday looked completely different.
But one short book changed it all.
Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
It is almost the end of the year and it is also almost Christmas time.
Christmas is a major holiday here in the United States, but it hasn't always been like that.
Modern day Christmas is relatively new.
How we celebrate Christmas has only really been occurring for a little over 100 years.
And prior to that, Christmas really wasn't such an important holiday.
So, on today's episode, I want to discuss why we celebrate Christmas the way that we do, by focusing on the story that is credited with creating modern day Christmas.
Do you know what story I'm talking about?
If you don't, don't worry.
We're going to discuss it today while, of course, helping you with your listening comprehension and building your English vocabulary.
So if you want to know more about why we celebrate Christmas, the way that we do, follow along, because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find the list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode, so you can take them, study them and build your English vocabulary.
Now let's talk about this story.
You might have already guessed it, but the story that I'm talking about is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
I'm going to start with talking a little bit about the history of this story and who Charles Dickens was, and then its impact on Christmas and the different adaptations that you can watch to help you build your English vocabulary and practice your listening comprehension.
A little bit about Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in England, and he was the second of eight children.
And when he was just 12 years old, his father was sent to a debtor's prison.
Now, these prisons don't exist nowadays, but at the time it was where you were sent.
If you owed money and you could not repay it.
Because his father was sent to this prison.
His father was no longer able to work and And Charles Dickens actually had to leave school and start working so he could support his family.
At the time, there were no child labor laws that meant that he could work even though he was only 12 years old and he no longer had to go to school.
This experience with child labor and poverty left a lot of scars and influenced his writing.
Charles Dickens did become a famous writer and he has a number of famous works.
A lot of them focus on these themes of poverty and social criticism and difficult childhood experiences.
You may or may not have read his books.
Dickens is known for having a style of writing that can be a little bit difficult to read, and a lot of his stories are very long.
But you might be familiar with the ideas of the stories or maybe you've seen some of the adaptations.
For example, Bleak House, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations all have these ideas of social criticism, social class and poverty throughout the stories.
By the early 1840s, Dickens had already become a very popular writer, but his career was on the decline.
That means that he wasn't selling as well as he had before.
His books weren't really doing as well, they weren't as well received, and he really needed to have some really good book come out to help boost his career.
In October of 1843, Charles Dickens gave a speech in Manchester calling for better conditions for the working class and for better education.
He had read reports of children working in factories and in conditions that were really horrible.
He had had experience as a child working in child labor and he was really horrified that it was still occurring in his country that children were still being forced into these really bad working conditions.
He wanted to continue to raise awareness, and his first thought was to write a political pamphlet.
But then he decided to instead write a story.
I don't know about you, but personally, I can say I don't think I've ever read a political pamphlet.
It Maybe it's something that people would read, but it also seems a little bit boring.
If you were given the option to read some political writings or to read a story, I would say most people would probably go for the story.
You're more likely to pick that option.
So Dickens thought maybe he could come up with a story that could get people's attention and raise awareness on the issue, but maybe not sounding so preachy.
To sound preachy means to sound like you're lecturing someone to tell them what to do, how to act in a moral way.
So he wanted to raise awareness, but not sound so preachy while he was doing it.
And he also really wanted his story to be a ghost story, one that had warmth, and emotion, while highlighting the issues of poverty and greed.
He started working on A Christmas Carol and he would walk through the streets of London at night acting out the scenes with himself.
He ended up completing the story in just six weeks.
When he took it to his publisher, his publisher actually did not think it would sell very well.
Like I said, Dickens was on a decline in his career.
He was not selling as many books as he had previously, so his publisher did not have a lot of confidence that this book would sell well.
Dickens, though, was undeterred.
Undeterred means that nothing was going to stop him.
His publisher telling him no was not going to stop him from publishing.
Instead, what he did was he self-published.
He actually paid for the publishing himself.
So his publisher didn't have to pay it and didn't have to take the risk if the story did not sell well.
The story was published on December 19, 1843.
There were 6,000 copies that were published, and all of them were sold out by Christmas Eve.
You might not know Christmas Eve is December 24, so within five days, all 6,000 copies were sold.
And the story sold so well because it was so popular.
Critics and readers fell in love with the story.
The story focuses on the character Ebenezer Scrooge.
He's a businessman.
He is known for treating his workers with contempt, which means he doesn't respect them.
He doesn't really like them.
He doesn't really like anyone.
He's kind of a mean, grumpy old man.
One of his employees is the father of a sick child, and this child needs money to help with his medical condition.
Scrooge really does not help this employee or anyone really in the story and that's really the setup.
What ends up happening is that Scrooge is visited one night by three ghosts.
The ghosts go through different parts of his life, and...
This experience changes him.
It changes his outlook on life, because he sees what his life has become and what it will be like in the future.
Because of the story's emotional impact.
There were reports that readers actually cried when they were reading the book.
There's a story that a business owner actually gave his employees one extra day off as a result of reading A Christmas Carol.
And that really shows you the emotional impact that the story had at the time.
In the mid-1800s, Christmas wasn't actually celebrated in the way that it is now.
It was considered more of a religious holiday and it was maybe more of a minor holiday.
If you don't know, Christmas was actually banned during the 1600s in England.
Oliver Cromwell was in charge during this time and the Parliament was really dominated by Puritans.
I've done an episode where I've talked about Puritans.
They have a very big impact in the history of the United States.
And I mentioned them when I talked about the Salem witch trials.
The Puritans were very religiously conservative.
They thought that Christmas was ungodly. and two tied to the Catholic faith.
So they actually banned the celebration of Christmas for a number of years.
The ban didn't last very long, but this idea that Christmas should be a very strict religious holiday still stuck around.
People really thought of Christmas as a religious observance, but A Christmas Carol changed that.
The story really focused on celebrating family, being generous with your neighbors and helping those who are in need.
Really having this whole idea of the spirit of giving, something that we talk about now when we talk about the Christmas season.
We say that it is the time to give back to people, the time to give back to your local community.
And that idea really started with this book.
And that's why A Christmas Carol is credited with creating modern day Christmas.
It rebranded Christmas.
It took it from a minor religious observance to a holiday where you celebrate your family, where you help others, where you give to other people.
There's also a number of vocabulary terms that became popular because of this story.
Here in the United States during the month of December, you hear and see Merry Christmas everywhere.
That phrase, Merry Christmas, actually was not very popular before A Christmas Carol came out.
The book helped popularize that saying.
Calling someone a Scrooge also came from the book because of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge.
Like I said, Scrooge is not a nice person at the beginning of the story.
He's very greedy.
He doesn't want to help anyone.
And his name became synonymous with calling someone maybe a grumpy, unhelpful person.
So if you call someone a Scrooge, you're saying that they're greedy, that they don't like to help people.
Maybe they're a little bit mean and people don't really want to be around them.
That's not a nice thing to be called a Scrooge.
Scrooge also says bah humbug, and that's something that I opened this episode with.
That saying bah humbug is what he says when he doesn't want to help someone, when he really is pushing back against this idea of a Christmas spirit or helping people who are in need.
That's something that you might hear.
People will say it, at least I've heard it being said as a joke.
When someone says bah humbug, it's them kind of joking that they don't want to be happy, that they don't want to participate in Christmas.
I've never heard someone say it and actually mean it, but maybe more as a joke saying bah humbug.
If you want to read A Christmas Carol to help you with your English, that is definitely something you can do.
It is called a novella, which means it's not that long of a story.
Like I said, some of Charles Dickens' stories are very long.
They're known for being very long.
So this is something that's more accessible.
It's something that you might be interested in reading if you want to use it, and use reading to improve your English.
But if you don't want to read it, that's okay too, because there are a number of adaptations.
We're going to talk about the different adaptations.
I'm going to give you a brief summary, maybe why you might want to watch that one versus another.
So you can see if there's a particular adaptation that you would like to watch to help you with your English.
The first one is a TV movie from 1984.
It is titled A Christmas Carol.
It was filmed in England and it is considered to be the most faithful adaptation to Charles Dickens' original story.
It stars George C. Scott as Scrooge and is considered to be a classic in England.
One of my favorite versions is actually from 1999.
It is another TV movie that is titled A Christmas Carol.
But in this one, it stars Patrick Stewart as Scrooge.
Stewart had actually starred as Scrooge before on stage in a play.
He was in a one-man stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol.
So he had already played this character.
Therefore, in this adaptation, he has a very intense character.
Sharp adaptation of Scrooge.
It is a little bit darker than the 1984 adaptation.
The ghost scenes at the time were considered to be a little bit more intense, but it is a very good adaptation.
I also think it is free on YouTube.
I have seen it in the past and past years free on YouTube during the month of December.
Search for it.
You might be able to find it for free.
If you have children who are trying to learn English, if you're trying to help them learn English at a young age, there definitely are adaptations that are more marketed and geared for children.
One is from 1983.
It is Mickey's Christmas Carol.
It is a Disney production.
It has Scrooge McDuck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy the characters that you have seen in other Mickey animations.
Definitely good for children because it is an animated movie marketed for younger children.
It's only 25 minutes long, so if you do have a young child who maybe doesn't want to watch a very long movie, this is a really good adaptation.
The one that I watched a lot when I was a child was from 1992, and it is The Muppet Christmas Carol.
This one is very popular because the Muppets are very popular.
It is again more geared for children, but maybe a little bit older children than ones that would like Mickey Mouse.
It actually stars Michael Caine as Scrooge.
Michael Caine I think is one of the better actors who played Scrooge.
And then you have Kermit and Gonzo and a lot of the other Muppet characters in the movie.
Because it is a Muppet movie, because it is maybe for children.
It does have a lot of humor thrown in.
But it does stay pretty faithful to the story and still tries to have that emotional impact.
And Kane's serious performance along with the Muppets really helps balance the film.
There is a motion capture one as well from 2009.
It is called A Christmas Carol and it stars Jim Carrey as Scrooge and actually all three ghosts as well.
It uses motion capture technology, which was new at the time.
It was considered to be, I guess, groundbreaking in a way because it did use the motion capture technology when it was still relatively new.
I will say personally, I don't like it that much.
I find it to be a little bit creepy and weird because the faces just seem a little bit strange.
This is probably my least favorite adaptation, not because of the performance or anything, but just because I find the motion capture technology to be a little bit weird.
However, the technology did allow for some of the more surreal scenes, some of the more ghostly scenes, to be portrayed in the movie.
There's also films that have been inspired by A Christmas Carol, but try to do a more modern take on it.
For example, there is Scrooge from 1988.
This stars Bill Murray as the main character.
He actually does not play Ebenezer Scrooge.
He plays Frank Cross.
Frank Cross is not in England in the 1800s.
Instead, he is supposed to be in modern day, and he is a TV show executive.
He is considered to be very cold-hearted, just like Scrooge was.
He's not very friendly.
He really only cares about money and the network's performance and ratings.
This adaptation is definitely more comedic because Bill Murray is a comedian.
It also is definitely influenced by the 1980s.
There's a lot of 1980s look and references in it, but it still is supposed to follow the general storyline and still have that emotional quality to it, And there's also a more modern comedy from 2022.
This is actually on Apple TV+, and it is called Spirited.
It stars Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell, but it flips the premise.
Instead of the ghost helping a person, a person is actually supposed to help the ghost in this one.
This is a musical comedy.
If you have seen anything that Will Ferrell or Ryan Reynolds have been in, you know that they like to do comedy.
They like to have a lot of humor in their work.
So this definitely follows those lines.
It does have a lot of original songs.
So if you like musicals, this could be a good option.
And our last film on our list is actually a film that tells the story of Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol.
This is from 2017, and it is called The Man Who Invented Christmas.
This stars Dan Stevens as Dickens and Christopher Plummer as Scrooge.
Christopher Plummer, of course, is great in a lot of things that he does.
And in the film it shows the characters of the book actually coming to life around him and how he interacts with them.
Like I said before, when he wrote this book he actually went around the streets of London acting it out.
While he was walking around in the streets,
This film kind of draws on that inspiration, showing it from his perspective how these characters are coming to life.
Of course it is slightly fictionalized, but it does show the behind the scenes story of how Dickens created his Christmas classic.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you learned a little bit about Charles Dickens, why he wrote A Christmas Carol and about the cultural impact that story has had on modern day Christmas.
I hope you also heard about these different adaptations and maybe found one that you would like to use to help you improve your English.
If you want more episodes like this in the future, please let me know.
We are already going to be going into 2026, so I'm going to start planning our episodes for the coming year.
So if you want more episodes like this, please leave a comment and let me know.
I just want to thank everyone who has listened to this podcast over this past year and really since I've started it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please consider leaving us a rating on whatever app you are using to listen to this podcast on.
You can also tell a friend, tell a family member, tell someone who is learning English, so we can continue to grow our audience.
You can follow us on social media at Learn English Pod.
The website is learnenglishpod.com.
And remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss our next episode when it comes out in 2026.
Until then, keep learning English.
