Each Christmas, Santa and his vast army of highly trained elves produce gifts and distribute them around the world in one night. However, when one of 600 million children to receive a gift from Santa on Christmas Eve is missed, it is deemed ‘acceptable’ to all but one – Arthur. Arthur Claus is Santa’s misfit son who executes an unauthorized rookie mission to get the last present half way around the globe before dawn on Christmas morning.

The tight-knit neighbors on Arthur Avenue have proudly lit Christmas luminaries for 40 years, but that long-standing tradition is cancelled this year when Matt Norman (Ty Wood), a teenage boy in the neighborhood, is hospitalized in desperate need of a heart transplant. As his parents Ann (Teri Polo) and Mike (Paul Essiembre) anxiously pray by his bedside, a donor is found, while in Detroit, a mother (Tess Harper) is in anguish at her own son’s bedside. When Matt’s neighbors decide to honor him in the best way they know how, they just might help save his life.

This cartoon version of A Christmas Carol hails from the production house of Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass–the team that brought you just about every other Christmas special you saw as a kid (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Reinvented as a 49-minute musical ghost story, it stars the voice of Walter Matthau as the bedeviled Scrooge and Tom Bosley as the Jiminy Cricket-type narrator, B. Humbug, Esq.