Posts tagged ‘Christmas Carol’

Dec 23

Norms do…A Christmas Carol (Part 2)

It’s incredibly close… only one full day to go until all the presents must be finished, the table primed, Nigella Lawson’s guidelines fully digested and memorised, and a tad of Delia Smith guidance absorbed to boot. And, as my preparations also get underway, this post will be my last before the great Christmas festival gets underway. Thereafter, posts may be a bit intermittent until New Year whereupon The Daily Norm will be back for 2012 with gusto!

In the meantime, and by way of a Merry Christmas gift to all of my followers, here as promised is the second part of my Christmas Carol feature, focusing on the seminal sections from Dickens’ great Christmas tale as illustrated by the Norms themselves. Merry Christmas!

The Cratchit family feast upon a pudding

The Cratchit family celebrate the great Christmas Pudding (2011, pen on paper, © Nicholas de Lacy-Brown)

Dec 20

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Norms do… A Christmas Carol (Part 1)

There is nothing on this earth more archetypical of Christmas than Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. With its moral narrative of bad turned good, a sprinkling of ghoulish magic, pantomime extremes of the baddy Scrooge and audience favourite, wretched but ever optimistic Tiny Tim, and its grim but terribly romantic portrayal of quaint, dirty Victorian London, all covered in snow, it is a story which has been the indubitable partner of the Christmas season since the time of its first publication. Subsequently, it has been adapted on countless occasions, from Alastair Sim’s chilling black and white 1951 portrayal, and the classic 1970 musical version starring Albert Finney in the title role, to the very unique treatment given to the story by the Muppets in 1992 and the new Disney 3D spectacular in 2009 to name but a few. It has also been on the stage, appeared on the national school curriculum, and is now considered such a staple of classic British literature that you can download it for free through an iPad (and they don’t give much away for free…). So, in the ever growing spirit of Christmas, and on the eve of 2012’s Dickens bicentenary celebrations, the Daily Norm thought it only appropriate to bring you some of the seminal moments from A Christmas Carol as portrayed by the Norms. This sketches take a while however, so check back for Part 2 at the end of the week. Enjoy!

Scrooge is haunted by Marley’s Ghost