Thrift Store Finds: Vintage Mickey’s Christmas Carol glass tumbler

An unseasonable Thrift Store Find this week.

In a lot of ways, my favorite book is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Equal parts a time travel story, a horror story, and a holiday tale, A Christmas Carol might have been written and published by Dickens for purely economic reasons but I still love it unreservedly. Further, I love all the hundreds of iterations of A Christmas Carol there are in the world just as much. Hundreds of adaptations on stage and screen have secured their takes on Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts… everyone from Mr. Magoo to Alex P. Keaton.

Of those adaptations, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Mickey’s Christmas Carol, a 1983 adaptation of Dickens’ work starring the large stable of Disney cartoon characters. Originally produced as a theatrical cartoon short paired with The Rescuers, I grew up with Mickey’s Christmas Carol as a mainstay of my holiday special binge-watching.

This glass tumbler was produced by Coca-Cola in 1982 as a promotional giveaway.

 

I can’t seem to find any reason why the glasses were printed with 1982 copyright information when the movie was released in ’83… but there you go.

Depicted here are Mickey in his role as Bob Cratchit and Mortimer “Morty” Mouse as Tiny Tim.

The back of the glass identifies both characters and The Coca-Cola Company. The glass is in VERY nice shape. Our thrift store sells a lot of these advertising glasses and I’ve never been all that interested in picking up any pieces. Besides being pretty uninterested in collecting glassware, most of the examples I find are clearly worn out from too many trips through the dishwasher. That’s not the case here – the colors are nice and vivid.

One of the big criticisms of Mickey’s Christmas Carol is that it really doesn’t have all that much Mickey Mouse in it. By far, the main character in this short is Scrooge McDuck. It looks as if Coca-Cola did produce a tumbler featuring the image of Scrooge, as well as a third with Goofy portraying the Ghost of Jacob Marley. Truth be told, I would have much rather found either of those glasses than this one… but as a fan of the cartoon and the book on which the cartoon is based, I had to pick this up.