It might have started in high school, when I tried to start a personal tradition of listening to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, as performed by Patrick Stewart. It's an abridged performance, just under two hours, but what a performance. I judge all other readings against Stewart's. Happily, it is currently available to listen to on Archive.org, below:

Stewart also starred in a 1999 TV production, which is also available on Archive.org. I never saw that version until skipping through it just recently (so I still haven't really watched it all the way through). It costars Richard E. Grant as Cratchit, Joel Grey as the Ghost of Christmas Past, also Ian MacNeice, Trevor Peacock, Celia Imrie, Dominic West (who keeps cropping up in recent watches: Brassic, Tomb Raider from 2018).

Listening to the audio, from a couple of cassette tapes I still have near my desk, I generally spaced it out over two or three nights. There is something about Dickens, as little as I have actually read of him, that cries out to be read out loud. One of the ways he became famous was for his tours at which he would read and perform his stories. I remember reading that Dickens would even ad lib and improvise changes on the fly depending on how he felt at the time and how he felt the audience would react. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail just begs to be spoken. As does the following:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Stewart even vocalizes the bells that toll Marley's approach, which is not part of the text, but is absolutely effective in his performance.

A Christmas Carol was my family's most consistent holiday story, edging out It's a Wonderful Life, and A Christmas Story. On film, the most memorable Scrooge for me was played by George C. Scott.