Scrooge, miser, is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve and transformed into a man who keeps Christmas well. Dickens wrote it in six weeks, in debt, needing the money, and it sold out immediately. The story has been adapted so often that its images have become cultural furniture: Tiny Tim's crutch, Marley's chains, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The prose is sentimental and also genuinely moving; Dickens believed in conversion, in second chances, in the possibility of change. The story helped invent the modern Christmas. It reminds us, every year, that we can be better than we are.