Today’s reading is from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It seems as if no Christmas celebration would be complete without some reference to this book. We owe many of our notions of just what Christmas should be like to Dickens who was instrumental in restoring Christmas to being a time of celebration. He used this story of redemption partly to show to his fellow Victorians the desperate state of the poor.

There have been many film versions of this story, too many to mention.  In our family it has become a tradition to watch our favourite – the Muppet Christmas Carol and, for us, Tiny Tim will forever be a small green frog…