The Quick 10: 10 Sequels to A Christmas Carol

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the best-known Christmas tales in history. It’s one of my favorites – long before I could read, I repeatedly watched Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the Disney adaptation that featured Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge (of course). Dickens’ original wraps up pretty quickly, though – basically everyone lives happy ever after without any real detail. That’s where these other authors picked up – here’s how 10 of them imagined how the story continued.

1. Scrooge takes over the role of Christmases Past, Present and Future. In the short comic strip Of Christmas Past, Scrooge picks up where his ghostly friends left off, trying to help his nephew figure how to deal with the man who murdered his wife.

2. Tiny Tim grows up to live in a brothel and solve murder mysteries. Sounds sketchy, I know, but The New York Times named the book Mr. Timothy on its 2003 List of Notable Fiction.

3. Tiny Tim grows up to be a businessman more heartless than Scrooge, even embezzling money and cutting his father off. There’s a full-length book called Whatever Happened to Tiny Tim, but British readers might be familiar with a version of it called Not-So Tiny Tim that has been read on BBC Radio 7.

4. Tiny Tim is an infectious zombie that brings the apocalypse.

When I saw a book at Barnes and Noble about the Beatles as zombies, I thought to myself, “Well, the zombie craze has finally gone too far.” This only reinforces that for me, although I am a bit intrigued. According to THE 2009 book

I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas

, it’s up to Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas to save the world.

5. Scrooge gets too generous for his own good; people take advantage of him and he’s left as poor as Bob Cratchit once was.

A Christmas Carol II

was an episode of the

George Burns Comedy Week

in 1985 – in fact, it’s probably the episode the short-lived series is best known for.

6. Scrooge asks a grown-up Tiny Tim for help freeing Marley’s Ghost.

Originally known as

The Spirit of the Season,

this tale was recently adapted into a musical called

that just premiered in Portland, Oregon, earlier this year.

7. We discover what happened in the life and afterlife of Jacob Marley. There are two works that address this topic, actually, both called Marley’s Ghost. There was a book written in 2000 by Mark Hazard Osmun and a play written three years later by Jeff Goode.

8. Tiny Tim moves to America and gets rich, but his grandson is off fighting in WWI, leaving Tim alone on Christmas Eve. As you might guess, he’s visited by a few spirits - that’s the plot of Timothy Cratchit's Christmas Carol, 1917, a 1998 novel.

9. Cratchit becomes Scrooge’s partner, as promised, but they’re busy fighting off other unscrupulous bankers. Scrooge and Cratchit sounds like a mix of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, doesn’t it?

10. Scrooge stands trial on Judgment Day to see if the good deeds he performed in his new-and-improved life actually outweigh his miserly doings. The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge is a pretty philosophical look at the whole thing and was written by a professor from New York University.