A Christmas Carol

The story that invented Christmas as we know it — short enough to read in one evening, and worth doing every December.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miser and proud of it, until the ghost of his old partner Jacob Marley arrives dragging the chains he forged in life, and warns him that three spirits will come. The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come take Scrooge through his own lost boyhood, into the Cratchits' small warm kitchen with Tiny Tim beside the fire, and finally to a neglected grave with his name on it.

Dickens wrote it in six weeks and changed the holiday forever. Bah! Humbug!, God bless us, every one! — few short books have left a deeper mark on the language or on the season.

Ideal for

• Reading aloud as a family in December
• A perfect Christmas gift, and a very short one
• School reading and first-time Dickens readers