A Christmas Carol, aka Scared Straight for the Holidays

There are so many versions of Charles Dickens' classic tale out there, it is hard to really point any one as the "right one" to see.  I personally prefer to see a musical version on stage, it gives the story a much more organic feel.  For the TV versions, I would point to ones with Patrick Stewart and George C. Scott playing the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, as the ones I would look for.
The "holiday spirit" of the story is clear: your afterlife will be terrible if you value your money (or your work) over your human relationships, and have utter disdain for poor people.  Four ghosts visit Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve/Christmas morning and show him that while he was once attached to the human race - he had a sister he loved, and a girlfriend/fiance - he is now a miserable miser with no compassion or love in his heart.  His former partner Jacob Marley died on Christmas Eve (how pleasant), and his ghost is the first to visit Scrooge and inform him, in my interpretation, that he is probably going to die soon, and unless Scrooge wants to wander around in purgatory, like Marley, he better straighten up.  Scrooge, of course, takes more convincing.  The ghost of Christmas past re-introduces him to painful memories of love lost - the aforementioned sister, now deceased, and the fiance who left Scrooge while he was a younger man, because he worked a lot of overtime.  The ghost of Christmas present shows Scrooge that his estranged nephew is living a good life, without Scrooge's presence, and that Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's employee, is living in poverty because Scrooge is paying him at slave's wages.  The ghost of Christmas future (or Christmas yet to come) shows Scrooge dead, and no one seems to care except the homeless people who rob his corpse.  This ghost (usually show having an appearance like the grim reaper) showing Scrooge his own grave is an especially nice touch for the holiday spirit.
Scrooge awakes from this torturous nightmare, and suddenly has an epiphany that he needs to re-connect with his nephew, raise Bob's wages and pay for Bob's sick son's medical care, as well as treating human kind better, in general.  Uplifting, yes... but that is up to interpretation.