Celluloid Visions Are What Dance in My Head. “No matter how many

good baking and roasting

smells waft through the house or apartment, no matter how

old-fashioned and bountifully decorated the Highland Fraser

fir, no matter how many halls are decked with boughs of

holly and how many carols about merry gentlemen and lords

a-leaping are sung, my Christmases will always have a tragic

flaw. They’re not taking place in England.

These expectations are primarily the fault of the 1951 British

film version of A Christmas Carol, directed by Brian

Desmond-Hurst and starring Alastair Sim as a sympathetic if

rather bug-eyed Ebenezer Scrooge. Mr. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob

Cratchit, may be poor, but the holiday dinner at his house is

the epitome of Yuletide merriment.”