A Christmas Carol

In 1824, a young boy's father was sent to prison and the boy was forced to leave school and work in a shoe polish factory. By the mid-1800s, he had seen enough poverty and hardships that he wanted to write a manifesto about capitalist greed. Inspired by stories of traditional old English Christmas, he, now a young man, decided to change that into a story that single-handedly led to the return of Christmas as a festival of merriment and bonhomie, and reinvented it as a secular festival meant for giving and sharing.

More than one-and-a-half century later, the book is the cornerstone o....