I begin my “Female Fridays” with the version that has become a tradition. It is usually the first A Christmas Carol (ACC) adaptation I watch on the first Friday of the season.

The last decade of the 20th Century introduced the first adaptation of A Christmas Carol where portraying Scrooge, at least, is by a female. Ebbie is this first large-scale production.  Others soon followed and have continued. It’s a Lifetime cable channel movie from 1995. An alternate title is Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story, such as on the DVD release. Ebbie was innovative as a full-length feature with a female Scrooge back when it was originally presented. ACC adaptations with a female lead are now common and starting to becoming banal.

Despite modernization and some gender changes, the movie follows the basic template of A Christmas Carol.

Soap opera star Susan Lucci (All My Children) is Elizabeth “Ebbie” Scrooge. Scrooge is not very old, but a forty-something fashionista.  As the owner of Dobson’s Department Store, she only cares about Christmas as a time of retail opportunity.  Her assistant is single-mother Roberta “Robbie” Cratchet.  Her niece is Francine aka “Frannie.” Francine is also the name of Ebbie’s dead sister, her niece’s mother. Ebbie’s sister and niece is a dual role played by Molly Parker.

The story beings with all the familiar trappings of the ACC story in a modern setting. This includes Ebbie begrudgingly giving her assistant at least a half-day off on Christmas Day. Ebbie heartlessly refuses to give an annual charity donation along with other local retailers when asked to. She dutifully hands out small Christmas bonuses to employees and fires one of them on Christmas Eve.

In this version, it is only one year since Ebbie lost her mentor and business partner, Jake Marley (Jeffrey Dunn, Dale from AMC’s Walking Dead).  Marley appears as a creepy ghost and whisks Ebbie from her home. At first they appear to be on an elevator to Hell, but he eventually takes her back to her department store. On this journey, he also starts receiving eerie sounding phone calls from “his boss.” Using business speak, Jake sets up “three meetings” for her. He tells her each “appointment time” for each ghost she will encounter.

This is a version that goes the MGM Wizard of Oz route where the ghosts are doppelgangers of familiar faces. (Note: this isn’t the first ACC adaption to do this. The 1954/55 U.S. television version was first).  The Ghost of Christmas Past is actually two ghosts. The Ghosts are a pair of young woman in the guise of two perfume counter clerks. We had seen the clerks earlier in Ebbie’s department store.  As if to cover their poor acting, the pair of ghosts wear tasteless attempts at period costumes. They look like late 1960’s cheap dance hall girls, instead.  They take Ebbie to relive select times in her life. The ghosts’ outfits change as they jump decades and scenes. They are always distracting and trashy.

We see Ebbie’s childhood, the cruel father, and the beloved sister. Here, the sister is not younger, but older by many years. Ebbie sees herself in the early years as a low-ranking employee of the department store she now owns. The Past introduces the heavily emphasized love story between her and Paul. Paul is the male equivalent of Dickens’ ACC character Belle (remember, Lifetime made this). The Ebbie version expands the story with her sister beyond Dickens. Ebbie is seen as a young adult with her elder sister when her sister is pregnant. Her sister’s death is also portrayed. (This is a non-Dickens borrowing from the 1951 Alistair Sim version.)

We move into learning how Ebbie Scrooge and Jake Marley acquired the department store.  They started under the wings of original storeowners, Mr. and Mrs. Dobson.  Over time, Marley and Ebbie finagle public shares of the store and take it from the Dobson couple.  The Dobsons are this version’s Fezziwigs.  Although this is not canon in the traditional Dickins story, it is another heavy borrowing from the 1951 A Christmas Carol film (Alastair Sim version) when Scrooge and Marley treat the Fezziwigs horribly and foreclose on them.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is a doppelganger of another store employee. It is the employee who happens to be the store’s gift wrapper of presents (get it?) in a silly costume.  Many of the standard ACC events are here, particularly Roberta Cratchit’s children, including sick son Timmy (played by Taran Noah Smith, known as one of the children on the 1990’s U.S. sitcom  Home Improvement). In this version, Ebbie only allows her Cratchit a half-day off at Christmas and insists she works the other half.

Surprisingly, this modern adaptation depicts the metaphorical children, Ignorance and Want; they are called “Ignorance and Poverty” by the Ghost in this version. I give kudos to this rendering for doing so. It is rare that modern adaptations include them. Even many traditional versions omit them. The English 2000 version by ITV included a variation of them.

The Future gives us one more employee doppelganger. This time, it is the one that Ebbie fired from her store on Christmas Eve earlier in the movie.  An unusual twist is that Ebbie sees her demise and lonely death instead of merely seeing her grave after the fact.  (A similar scene was in the 1910 silent version.)  Two years later, the next female version, Ms. Scrooge, would do something similar yet again. Then it’s on to the usual, bland reworkings of our reformed anti-heroine’s Christmas Day yahoos.

I may have seemed harsh, but I also think this is very acceptable Christmas viewing. But not really as a good helping of A Christmas Carol. This is more like an artificially sweetened dieter’s special.  Though this was the first big step in the female Scrooge portrayals, it was done better in other versions that followed.