Some stories are so famous one approaches them knowing that anything worth saying has been said a thousand times. Such a story is A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s well-worn tale of a miser who learns that there’s more to life than he thinks. For reasons that are frankly a mystery to me, my family has a long tradition of watching The Muppet Christmas Carol every Thanksgiving to open the holiday season. A few years ago, watching it again, I realized that I had never really understood it.

Jim Henson Productions / Disney

In the 1992 Muppet adaptation of the familiar story, Scrooge, played by Michael Caine, is dramatically and cruelly indifferent toward others; not only in his famous condemnation of the immiserated poor to death, but in hurling a Christmas wreath at an unlucky Muppet who comes a-caroling at his door. He steps onto the screen accompanied by a nasty wind and a judgmental chorus calling him “Mr. Greed.” And, curiously, though the story you are about to see is Scrooge’s story, you are actively invited not to sympathize with him—when a chorus of Muppets sings, “he must be so lonely, he must be so sad,” it’s a joke, even though future events will reveal Scrooge to be both.