A conversation with Willem Lange involves a fair amount of laughter. At 90, he is as lighthearted as Ebenezer Scrooge after his encounters with the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.
The link between Lange — a public television host, one of Northern New England’s best known outdoorsmen and a longtime columnist for this newspaper — and Charles Dickens’ fictional miser-turned-philanthropist is of longstanding. At 7 p.m. on Dec. 20 in Hanover’s St. Thomas Church, Lange will recite Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” for the 50th, and final year.
The spirit behind the classic Christmas tale remains ageless, Lange said, but he does not.
“God has blessed me with 90 years,” he said in a phone interview from his home in East Montpelier, Vt. “I’m tired.”
Every year, getting ready for the recitation is a bit more taxing. Though he brings a script of the 65-minute condensed version to the lectern, he commits to reciting it from memory.
On Monday morning, he lay in bed a little while longer, going over the scene when Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning, a changed man, and goes to the window to see what day it is. “Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist, no night; clear, bright, stirring, golden day.”
“Just when I said that, the sun came out,” Lange said, so he got out of bed.
Dickens brought “A Christmas Carol” to the U.S., reading it aloud in Boston in 1867, from a script he’d shortened himself.
Lange first encountered the annual reading of it in 1953, when he was a student at The College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. A professor there recited it during chapel each December and Lange envisioned himself taking on the role someday.
But it wasn’t until he was 40 and into a three-decade career as a contractor that he bit the bullet. His pastor had told him, ” ‘All these things you talk about doing, you ought to do them, or shut up,’ ” Lange said.
To develop the script, Lange sat down with a vinyl record of Dickens’ stage version of “A Christmas Carol” and laboriously wrote it out so he could memorize it. (He later repeated this work when he put the script into a file on his computer.)
In December 1975, Lange and his wife, Ida, set up folding chairs they’d borrowed from the church in their Etna home. They’d had enough money to build the house, but not enough to furnish it, so they took in stride the notion, expressed by attendees, that the Langes had put their furniture in storage for the event.
The second year, they had to hold two performances, as attendance doubled, Lange said. The following year, they held it at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where it’s taken place ever since. For those first couple of years, he borrowed a tailcoat from James Sykes, a longtime Dartmouth music professor, then got one of his own. For years he wore a tuxedo, but now just wears black, the universal color of theatrical backgrounds.
And make no mistake, reciting “A Christmas Carol” is a theatrical event.
“I have an inner actor, if you know what I mean,” Lange said about what appeals to him about reciting the story each year.
Christmas carries a bit less weight for him now, with his kids grown up and his wife no longer with him. Ida Lange, who was known as “Mother” in Lange’s columns and public radio commentaries, died in 2018. But Dickens’ story retains its power.
“The meaning of light, shining on in darkness,” Lange said. “In that darkness, we are all trying to shine a light. That’s what this does for me: It focuses on the spirit of giving.”
It helps that the reading, which is free, but open to donations, has raised money for the Upper Valley Haven over the years.
Lange also recorded “A Christmas Carol” for Vermont Public Radio years ago, and it still goes out over the airwaves every December, as does his reading of “Favor Johnson,” a Christmas story he based on the life of an Etna farmer that was first broadcast in 1994.
He has tried to find someone else interested in reciting “A Christmas Carol,” but “I found myself unable to give it up,” he said. He’s opting instead to “quietly disappear.”
“Successor to what?” he said. “Just an old guy reading a story, you know.”
In that scene where Scrooge goes to his window, he tries to laugh, but is so out of practice that he can’t quite figure out how. Lange draws the scene out, trying a rough guffaw, a high-pitched “hee-hee,” and other awkward laughs in between. Often, the audience joins him.
“They’re laughing along with me, and it’s great fun,” he said.