"Did you know," I asked, "that a number of Harvard professors wrote carols?
In 1997, while writing for carol, MacFarlane planned to develop the Larry shorts into a short film series for MADtv; however, the project was abandoned because the show did not possess a large enough budget to make any kind of animation.
Composed there somewhere in the early 19th century, it's one of the few surviving slave-written carols.
Were Dickens to write A Christmas Carol now, we'd be the anti-Scrooges, flinging money at the spectre of Austerity Yet to Come, and Bob Cratchit would have bought Tiny Tim an Xbox Kinect on tick.
When Dickens sat down to write A Christmas Carol in October 1843, he was frightened and broke.
Some of the greatest composers in the canon, including Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Holst, have turned their hand to writing Christmas carols (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and In The Bleak Midwinter, respectively).
Within this genre, he has crafted dozens of new arrangements of existing carols and written many original carols, some at the request of the BBC, for the purpose of television broadcast.
And for even more creativity, try getting your class to write their own Christmas carol, which they can set to an existing tune or create from scratch.
A big hit at the time, its social message was to "strike a blow for the poor", The Chimes has since been overshadowed by A Christmas Carol, written a year earlier.
One early minor poem was "Masters in this Hall" (1860), a Christmas carol written to an old French tune.
This year alone, audiences can look forward to four releases over the next few weeks: The Star, a CGI children's film about the birth of Jesus told from the animals's perspective; The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Christopher Plummer as Charles Dickens while he wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843; and Christmas-themed sequels to Bad Moms and Daddy's Home.
