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.

 

odds and ends: my christmas decorations, updated

Last year, I posted about my Christmas toy collection. That’s been a weirdly well-trafficked post, if all the WordPress site traffic things are to be believed. Seeing as that was popular, I thought I’d update a bit with some of my newer holiday acquisitions.

Two new guys on this shelf, which was last year just a catch-all for my Nightmare Before Christmas stuff.

I missed out on the first release of Frosty the Snowman figures from a couple of years ago. When I saw Forever Fun had rereleased Frosty, I snapped him up immediately. He’s a fairly good figure with some screen specific accessories. The hat is supposed to stick to Frosty’s head via a magnet, but it’s so weak I had to stick it on there with some FunTac.  Unfortunately they haven’t made a Professor Hinkle or Karen yet.

I’m dancing around the idea of starting to collect the toys made from Mickey’s Christmas Carol. It’s a cartoon I love but some of the pieces I’d need to round out a set are prohibitively expensive right now. I’ve only see Scrooge McDuck on eBay a handful of times and he always sells for a ridiculous amount of dough. I scooped up Goofy as Jacob Marley for a song though.

By that same token, there are MANY more Peanuts characters I could track down for my Charlie Brown Christmas display I’m going to draw the line with my final new acquisition.

No Peanuts display would be complete without Lucy Van Pelt. They’re all sort of crammed in there, but Lucy’s there in the back, manning her psychiatric booth. These toys are really wonderful. It’s a shame the company that makes them shifted formats a few years ago. They used to be about 6 inches tall, but now they’ve moved toward offerings around 4 inches.

I have to admit, of the five or six little collections I have going, finding new things for my Christmas display is one of the more fun ones of late.  It’s gotten to the point where I’ve gone against one of my old rules for buying these toys, whereby I’d only scoop them up after December 25th, when stores have crazy discounted them. The Toys r Us where I picked up Frosty at full price also had a couple of characters from the Frosty’s Winter Wonderland sequel, including Frosty’s wife Crystal and Frosty’s two kids. I may go back to TRU sometime after New Year’s and see if the rest of the snowman clan will be discounted.