This episode’s theme is reflection: looking back on the past year, and looking ahead to the year to come. Our two stories are about exactly that, wrapped ominously in the glitter of the holiday spirit.
We’ll start with our pals at Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, with one final dive into the post-zombiecalypse series Mercury: A Broadcast of Hope, as they reflect on the arrival of New Years’ Eve, and what that means about looking ahead when your world belongs to the undead. That’s the story behind broadcast #451 – “Auld Lang Syne.” (Remember, each broadcast-style podcast is only available online for 24 hours, so if you want to unlock the full series and its hundreds of episodes, head to patreon.com/MercuryRadio.)
After that, we’ll spend the bulk of the hour listening to the darker holiday precursor to Charles Dickens’ best known work, A Christmas Carol. It was originally a story within a story: one of the characters in Dickens’ novel, The Pickwick Papers, tells his fictional friends “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.” Sexton used to be the term for a church’s gravedigger, so you know right out of the gate that this is going to be a scary tale. Dickens wrote this first, then used the same formula for his later, better known Christmas story. Here, Gabriel Grub replaces Scrooge, and goblins scare him into changing his wicked ways. The script for our audio version is based on a literary adaptation called The Goblins and the Gravedigger, a novella written by Kenneth Chumbley and Tonya McCain. Chumbley produced the audioplay in Ireland with Patricia Reynolds.
We hope your own future is frightfully good!
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