A ghost story, a cautionary moral tale, a political treatise and some traditional Christmas cheer, all rolled into a novella, short enough to read aloud in full by the fire on Christmas Eve.

Even today, what more could anyone want?

Adapt it any way you want - in a modern setting, with different languages, via children, zombies or puppets - the story holds up. It's a timeless message for all creeds - a warning not to give in to our weaker, meaner selves.

A cantankerous, greedy, selfish curmudgeon - Scrooge, the original whose name has by now become an actual noun - is visited by a series of ghosts on Christmas Eve, all warning him to change his ways, or else.

He sees the past, the present and the future, understands that it's never too late to see the light and change his narrative, and so he does. The horrible future he glimpses in his nightmare never comes to pass, and everyone gets turkey and presents. The end.

But the message is so simple, and so enduring. And there's the reason the version we saw onstage in Canberra last year is returning unchanged. Brisbane-based theatre company Shake & Stir's iteration is a perfect blend of classic Dickensian atmosphere and modern technology.

Reprising the production for sixth time this year - and the second season with a Canberra run - company co-founder, producer and cast member Nick Skubij says returning to the show each year is like slipping into a pair of warm, comfy slippers.

And it goes right up until Christmas Eve, effectively telling the story in real life (albeit with the cast then rushing straight to the airport).

In America, going to see The Nutcracker ballet on stage is a Christmas stalwart. In the UK, film and television stars ham it up in Christmas pantomimes. Shake & Stir launched the production as a way of introducing a similar Christmas tradition for Australia, a chance to inhabit an older world, a different era that still carries a bright message for modern times.

"We wanted to be able to do something that people could come to year after year, and enjoy that sense of tradition," Skubij says.

"Canberra is forward-thinking and I think Australia finds itself thinking of itself as young and innovative in general, and marching to the beat of its own drum. But that doesn't mean that there's not a place for these [traditions] - it's nice to be wholesome at Christmas too.

"It's not a religious thing, either. It's reconnecting with a general sort of moral goodness and humanity and looking out for each other and consequences and right from wrong.

"So it is a really simplified, brilliant way of reminding people about that, and it's a good reset once a year."

A reset is what we need. Despite the usual songs piping through shopping mall speakers, shops strung with decorations of varying taste and quality, and lights blinking through porches and balconies, trees and gardens throughout the suburbs, it's hard to feel excited about Canberra's ludicrous, patched-up- Nordic-style compromise of a tree - the one that came about as the result of a series of earnest discussions that must have been every bit as cringeworthy as the current result.

Aside from some top-notch holograms bringing the hostly vibes, the production is set, as it should be, in Victorian London.

Dingy streets, grubby streetscapes, run-down houses, lightly falling snow, poor people huddling around a fire and pining for turkey, an ailing child who may well die, and, at the centre, a fantastically cantankerous Scrooge wielding a candle in an old-fashioned nightcap.

Except that, in Brisbane at least, the cast emerge from the show each evening into 40-degree heat with 90 per cent humidity. Down in Canberra, in their first appearance here, the weather was strangely atmospheric, for a southern summer. This year looks set to be hot, dry and windy.

But this is the thing about Christmas in Australia - everything about it is borrowed and adapted. We have classic Christmas carols that reference European kingdoms, and put up Monterey Pines from California and decorate them with tinsel and lights. Reindeers appear in abundance - inflated, plastic, prancing on television screens, even though they don't exist in Australia. We hang branches with fake snow, and it has never snowed in summer here, not even in Canberra.

Meanwhile, it's ironic that image of Shake & Stir's Scrooge, played by Eugene Gilfedder, peering furiously through the light of his candle, is a far more effective signifier of the Christmas spirit than the actual, government-funded, self-consciously secular tree just a few minutes' walk from the theatre.

When he first began dreaming up his version of the apparition, Bryan Probets, who plays Marley, and the ghosts of Christmas past and present, mixed and matched his accents from a blend of Goon Show classics and the actress Jodie Whittaker who, with her distinctive Northern English accent, had recently taken on the titular role in Doctor Who.

He grew up with Dickens on the family bookshelves, and bringing characters that are nearly two centuries old to life feels natural.

"That's the thing I love about working for Shake & Stir. Whenever I have done shows with them, their translation of the books are very, very close," he says.

"They're very faithful to the original stories. So when they actually do put it in script form, they keep the original dialogue, they don't try and modernise it. Somehow that makes it even more timeless and classic when you do that ... The pages are literally right there in front of you on the stage."

Skubij says the play has hit the spot every time; the company does a charity collection each year, always for a different cause.

"Every year there seems to be something extraordinarily horrible happening in the world and it doesn't change," he says.

"It's the same this year, with war and with all this stuff going on around us. Don't we all deserve just an hour and a half, where we can go to an air-conditioned theatre, turn the lights off and go back to a simpler escapist time that is nothing like our reality?"

The play, like all popular works of literature - and Dickens was, by any measure, the superstar creator of his time - ends on a high note, tied up neatly like a beautifully wrapped present under a spruce tree. It's disingenuous, perhaps, to think that a mere nightmare could change a man's lifelong habits and transform him into a decent humanitarian type.

But whatever your views on Christmas - Grinch-adjacent (a modern iteration of the original Scrooge) or Mariah Carey-tinged (the glitzy, commercial end that speaks to retail therapy and the chance to indulge) - there should always be a place for Dickens.

And perhaps that's why he's found a place in Canberra. If the secular tree is more your thing, then remember how much Dickens understood how to make people think.

His Christmas fable is as political as any of his works, and says as much about human goodness and community spirit as the injustice regularly meted out to the poor.

He knew what it was to go without, and to be cast into an unthinkably cruel workhouse - a Dickensian setting if ever there was one - simply because he was unlucky enough to be born into a family seeing out hard times. Hard times, indeed, along with Great Expectations, Bleak House and Oliver Twist - all were commentaries on the vagaries of humans, in all our greed and generosity, selfishness and compassion.

In this light, A Christmas Carol is not a cosy tinsel-wrapped tree, but an angry polemic about injustice. Its message - about the need to fight for the rights of those less fortunate - still holds true.

Just like the little girl who, when a rattled and ashen-faced Scrooge asks her what day it is, wraps her arms around herself and declares, with unalloyed joy, "It's Christmas!"

And so it is, whatever that means for you. Get yourself to the theatre and inhale whatever Dickensian message that's right for you.