A Christmas Carol is the first, and the most famous novella by Charles Dickens in the Christmas Books series. Scrooge, an old miser, is "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner". He hates Christmas, calling it "humbug". The tale begins on a "cold, bleak, biting" Christmas Eve in London, exactly seven years after the death of Scrooge's business partner Jacob Marley. At home that night, Scrooge is visited by Marley's ghost, who is forever cursed to wander the earth dragging a network of heavy chains, forged during a lifetime of greed and selfishness. Check out to see how this and three other meetings with the spirits of Christmas changes a hopeless creature's life for good in this all-time classic, which have never been out of print.