Twelve Years of A Christmas Carol | Vintage Verse

In December 2014, thirty people gathered in a tiny candlelit church in the North Herts village of Caldecote. Most of them were friends. The church, St Mary Magdalene, is cared for by the Friends of Friendless Churches, a charity that preserves ancient places of worship whose congregations have long since disappeared, the villages around them often gone too. It was cold. And I stood at the front with a book in my hand and read them A Christmas Carol.

That was the beginning.

Mat performs his first reading of A Christmas Carol at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Caldecote in 2014.

I'd been away from performing for years and this felt like an easy way back in. It also felt appropriate as Dickens himself performed with a script on stage, his reading text propped before him as he conjured Scrooge and the Cratchits for Victorian audiences. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me.

For three years the show existed in that form. But somewhere along the way I realised that reading from a book, however well, created a distance between me and the audience that I wanted to close. I wanted to look people in the eye and be properly present with them in the room. So in the summer of 2017 I learned the entire text from memory with significant help from my close friend John (to whom I am eternally indebted), and that December I performed it without a script for the first time.

The show toured churches for a while after that, without tickets, without much fanfare. Its first ticketed performance came in 2019 and then the pandemic arrived and everything stopped.

When I came back in 2021 with four shows, something had shifted. Strangers bought tickets. Strangers came. And strangers said the kindest things afterwards. There is something particular about encouragement from people who have no obligation to be generous, people who simply enjoyed the show and wanted to say so. It was at that point I thought, this is ready. The tour has grown every year since.

I started doing this because I love to perform, and because I love Christmas. I wanted to create a tradition, something people might want to return to year after year, the way families return to the same carols or the same films or the same recipes. And in a small way, it seems to have happened. There are people who come back every December now, sometimes to the same venue, sometimes following the tour to somewhere new, bringing different guests each time to experience it fresh. Seeing a familiar face in the audience has become one of my favourite things about December.

What strikes me every year, returning to this story, is how little has changed. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 as a deliberate act of social conscience, a furious, tender argument for compassion, generosity and human decency. The fact that we still need that argument made, that its lessons sit largely unheeded after 180 years, is both disappointing and oddly reassuring. The story is not a period piece or a comfortable nostalgia trip. It's a story about now, dressed in a Victorian coat.

Mat returns in 2024 with his one-man performance to celebrate 10 years.

That is why I have always been determined to let the original words speak for themselves, unchanged and unparaphrased, exactly as Dickens wrote them. No updating for a contemporary audience, no shortcuts. Just the story, in a room, with people. The same way it has always worked best.

Twelve years on from that cold candlelit church in Caldecote, the show can be performed anywhere at a moment's notice. The village whose church we borrowed may be long gone. But the story keeps coming back. It always does.