I’ll admit it straight up.  I’m an A Christmas Carol lover.  Always have been, always will.  Am I a romantic?  Absolutely.  Do I love magical stories?  Yup.  Am I a sucker for the old nostalgic traditions of Christmas every year?  Oh yeah.  Do I play the Julie Andrews Christmas Album first every year when starting to decorate the house?  Absolutely positively.  So then, why haven’t I written a Christmas musical?

The answer has been pretty simple.  Absolute fear of writing shit.

I’ve wanted to write a Christmas musical for over forty years.  Yes, forty years.  But, the problem with it lies in a very simple obstacle:  Charles Dickens wrote something that’s at such a high bar that now, nothing ever seems good enough.  Damn him.

I started watching A Christmas Carol when I was in grade school.  The old, 1938 Reginald Owen movie always played on our black and white television at midnight of Christmas Eve.  My brother, sister, and I would stay up late that night to watch it.  Like The Wizard of Oz before it when I was young, this movie too, scared the bejesus out of me.  When Marley’s chains would clang out and he’d come through Scrooge’s door, I was petrified.  But I loved it.  And then, visiting all of Scrooge’s memories left me a lasting love for flashbacks.  Finally, with Scrooge becoming this really nice grandpa at the end of the show – man, I was hooked for life!  Each year, I still rotate bi-annually, between Patrick Stewart’s and George C. Scott’s portrayals of Scrooge.  I never tire of them.

But through all of these years of watching or reading A Christmas Carol, I still have had this inextinguishable desire to try to write a really good, moving, non-cliché, original, traditional Christmas musical.  But how??  Again, my bar was so darn high.  I had to write something that would have the subject matter dense enough, magical enough, traditional enough, Christmas-y enough, and nostalgic enough to meet the standard of Charles Dickens’ work.  Impossible.

This late spring, I was finishing a three-mile walk, and I ran into a neighbor who was walking with her frail, walker-bound father.  As we chatted, the father had questioned why he was even alive anymore – that there was no point to his living.  He said he couldn’t do anything anymore and felt useless.  I told him that my dad had gone through this same feeling and that my response to him was that he still made a difference to many people just by being there and sharing words of wisdom or kindness.  Sometimes you don’t realize how you can just change a person’s life for the better that day, through kind words.

We then parted ways.  Suddenly, twenty steps later, I stopped in my tracks.  It came to me – my Christmas musical idea!  I literally got back home, went to my computer, and started writing.  By August, I had my first readthrough of the script, and two days ago, I finished composing all of the music.  Wow.

Will this new musical be up to the Dickens’ standard?  Probably not.  Will it be cliché?  I certainly hope not.  Will it move folks?  I certainly hope so.  But what I can say is, that the show came from the heart and is an honest and open approach to the life of an older man whose wife died at Christmas, and now, a year later, wants nothing to do with Christmas anymore.  Whew.

I’m hoping to see my neighbor’s father again someday to let him know that his words of despair that one day this past spring, actually created the birthing of a brand, new original work. That man was still making important impact in his life.  What a treasure.  And what a treasure to me!  Let me introduce to you, A Christmas Journal.