After declining an invitation from his nephew to dine with him on Christmas, Scrooge rudely dismisses two gentlemen collecting money for charity.

Scrooge fires him and withholds a week's salary to compensate for the ruined hat, also demanding a shilling to make up the difference.

Scrooge is shown his unhappiness when he was left to spend the holidays alone at school, and his joy when his sister, Fan, came to take him home for Christmas.

Despite wearing a cheery manner for his family's sake, Bob is deeply troubled by the loss of his job, though he confides in no one except his daughter Martha.

The spirit hints that Bob's youngest son, Tim, will die of a crippling illness by the same time next year if things do not change.

He asks a boy in the street to buy the large turkey in the butcher shop's window for him, meaning to take it to the Cratchits.

The characters of Fred (Scrooge's nephew) and Elizabeth, his fiancée (his wife in the novelette), were greatly expanded in order to work in a romantic angle to the story that Dickens did not intend.

Ann Rutherford, better known as Polly Benedict in the MGM Andy Hardy film series and as Carreen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, was a young and attractive Ghost of Christmas Past, rather than the somewhat unusual creation that Dickens described.

Scrooge's fiancée, who eventually leaves him because of his miserly ways, was completely dropped from the shortened version, as were the two starving children "Want" and "Ignorance", who hid within the folds of the Ghost of Christmas Present's robe.

In 1988, MGM/UA Home Video and Turner Entertainment released A Christmas Carol on VHS celebrating its 50th anniversary, for the first time in a colorized version.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 1988 promoting the film's release on home video, actress June Lockhart admitted that, despite being an MGM production, it was "a 'B' picture".