Some folks are "Home Alone" lovers, while others are "Die Hard" fans. For me, it wouldn’t be the holiday season without singing along to "The Muppet Christmas Carol."

This year, I found myself thinking about Scrooge’s need to hoard and consume without a flicker of concern for those he hurt. It made me wonder what might happen if the spirits who came knocking weren’t ghosts of humanity—but animals exploited for food. In this version, Scrooge would fling open the shutters on Christmas morning and proclaim: “I’m vegan!”

The first spirit—perhaps a glowing, snow-white chicken—would take Scrooge to chickens in nature, who think and explore with the same intellect and curiosity we see in cats and dogs. These birds spend their days with friends, scratching for food and soaking up the sun.

The chicken spirit would then lead Scrooge to the very shed where he was raised for food—a place that reeked of ammonia and crawled with disease. Scrooge would see how the industry bred and drugged the chicken to grow so fast that his organs and legs couldn’t keep up. He’d witness him collapse, struggling to reach a sip of water.

With a flap of the spirit’s wing, Scrooge would watch in horror as workers slit the chicken’s throat and dropped him into scalding water. He went in fully conscious because the farm cut corners—high-speed lines and relentless cost-cutting—just like Scrooge. In that raw moment, the spirit might show him every chance he had to choose kinder foods—cauliflower wings, chickpeas, vegan nuggets—options he ignored while thinking only of himself.

The second spirit—a striking black-and-white cow with a tear-streaked face—would pull Scrooge straight into the present. Given the chance, cows nurture their young and form lifelong friendships. But right now, millions of cows are treated like milk machines, genetically manipulated and often pumped full of antibiotics and hormones. To steal their milk, workers take newborn calves from their mothers, causing distress to them both. At this moment, the cow’s tears flow for her beloved babies, kidnapped from her.

The Bovine Ghost of Christmas Present would also show Scrooge that human actions have measurable consequences. Each person who chooses to eat plants over animal-derived foods conserves around 1,100 gallons of water, nearly 40 pounds of grain and 30 square feet of forest every single day. And eating vegan for one month can prevent approximately 620 pounds of carbon emissions.

The final spirit—the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—would be a fish. He would be silent, drifting, his body outlined in shimmering light like a moon on dark water. He would show Scrooge two possible futures. One future follows the same path we’re on: billions of animals suffering in the agriculture industry, miles of tree stumps against polluted skies, rising temperatures and more than 828 million people experiencing hunger. At the same time, so much of the world’s grain is funneled into animals raised for food, sometimes 10 pounds of plants for just 1 pound of meat.

On the other path, the spirit offers Scrooge a vision of a future that begins not with miracles but with tiny human choices. He shows Scrooge how one person who shifts to vegan eating can spare around 200 animals a year. The wise fish tells of a new study published in Frontiers in Nutrition, which found that a nutritionally balanced vegan menu produced 46% less carbon, used 33% less land and required 7% less water than a Mediterranean diet. The ghost sweeps his fin, and Scrooge watches in awe as industrial agriculture shrinks and nature rushes back in—soil healing, birds returning, oceans cooling.

Holiday stories like "The Muppet Christmas Carol" endure because they help us envision better versions of ourselves. Dickens wrote about a man who realized that change, even later in life, matters. Today, choosing vegan is one of the simplest, most immediate ways to make a positive difference—for animals and the planet. So let our Christmas gift to the world—and ourselves—begin on our plates.

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Rebecca Libauskas is a climate research specialist for the PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

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