As Christmas approaches, we reach for our bookshelves and pull down Charles Dickens’ beloved tale of hardship, revelation, and a miser’s redemption in the holiday season. I speak, of course, of The Cricket on the Hearth, published in 1845 as the third of what would be Dickens’ five Christmas books. (The first, of which you may have heard, was A Christmas Carol.) From the very year of its publication, The Cricket on the Hearth found great success as a stage production, and it continued to be adapted even in the age of radio. The story was a century old by the time it aired on NBC, in the broadcast that opens the five-and-a-half-hour compilation of Christmas old-time radio above.
That video is just one of three uploaded in the past few weeks by the Youtube channel An Evening of Old-Time Radio. It collects a variety of Christmas-themed specials and broadcasts from shows like Lux Radio Theatre, The Coronet Little Show, and CBS Ceiling Unlimited (an aviation-promoting wartime effort created by Orson Welles).
The second volume features more than six hours of holiday episodes from the hit series of the Golden Age of Radio, including sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks, The Life of Riley, Fibber McGee and Molly, and its spinoff The Great Gildersleeve. Their characters, much like their listeners, struggle to do their shopping and organize their parties — and amid it all, of course, find their way to the true meaning of Christmas.
The latest video in An Evening of Old Time Radio’s “Yuletide OTR” series includes radio adaptations of It’s a Wonderful Life, which now defines the genre of the Christmas movie, followed by one of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Scheduled for release this Christmas day, the fourth installment promises yet more seasonally appropriate stories — with the requisite gags, complications, and final swells of good cheer — from such mid-century domestic comedies as The Aldrich Family, Lum and Abner, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. But as you’ll hear, neither could thriller, mystery, and western shows like The Man Called X, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, and The Six Shooter resist telling a Christmas tale — nor can we, all these decades later, resist hearing one.
Related content:
Bob Dylan Reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” On His Holiday Radio Show (2006)
Hear 149 Vintage Halloween Radio Shows from the Golden Age of Radio
Hear 90+ Episodes of Suspense, the Iconic Golden Age Radio Show Launched by Alfred Hitchcock
Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime Radio Series Dragnet
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I am wondering if these Old Time Radio shows you have on your site are available for downloading to my computer. My family loves Old Time Radio and I enjoy listening to them when I am not on the Computer. To me it is counter intuitive to listen on the computer. I put them on a external hard drive and play them on a radio that will play it and it gives me the Old Time Radio vibe that I remember as a child.
Sincerely
Jackie Schlageter
Thank you.
Just Google YouTube to MP3 and there’s dozens of online sites that allow you to download YouTube content.
I use a site called RUSC to download all of my favorite old time radio shows Jackie. You can listen to them on your computer, or download, and I do the same as you, because it really takes me back to such a warm and comforting time in my life! You have to be a member, but it’s worth it for the use of the site, and the ability to search for particular shows or series, and see what you have already listened to or downloaded.