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When Christmas Went Viral

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.715K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Christmas wasn't always a national shopping spree — or even a day off work. But in 19th-century London, it went viral. When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the book's tale of miserly Scrooge and the ghosts that transformed him transformed the holiday too, especially in the U.S.

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Transcript

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And now on to the show.

1:35.5

Once upon a time,

1:40.9

of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, old Scrooge sat busy in his

1:49.7

county house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy with all, and he could hear the

1:58.3

people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands

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