Move over, Shia: The Boston Globe's Kevin Hartnett says that Charles Dickens may have ripped the idea for A Christmas Carol off from some Massachusetts mill workers:

Dickens visited Lowell in 1842, touring the mills and taking notes for a travelogue he planned to write on American institutions. The next year, he published “A Christmas Carol.”... After reading an obscure literary journal published by Lowell textile workers and comparing it to Dickens’s novella, a Boston University professor and student are arguing that some of the most memorable elements of Dickens’s story—the ghosts, the tour through the past, Scrooge’s sudden reconsideration of his life—closely resemble plot points in stories by the city’s “mill girls” that Dickens read after his visit.

I find this news very to be very depressing. If they find out that A Charlie Brown Christmas was copied from an obscure Czech cartoon, I'm going to have to go ahead and cancel Christmas.