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From the Flyer: "A CHRISTMAS CAROL" BY CANDLELIGHT It's a Dickens of a tour! Back for its second holiday season, our special ninety-minute walking tour of historic Gettysburg features a solo performance of Charles Dickens' immortal tale of ghosts and Yuletide redemption.  We'll even treat you to a free cup of steaming hot chocolate after the tour.  Catch the Christmas Spirits!

From the Ground Up     It was the fall of 2003.  Steve Anderson, lead writer for SGA CREATIVE and also a professional actor, had been performing in a stage version of "A Christmas Carol" for three years, and he loved the story.  He'd also heard a one-man performance of "A Christmas Carol," and he loved that even more.  He wanted to work up his own solo version of "Carol," he said, if he could just find a venue.... Meanwhile, we'd been working hard to help Sleepy Hollow of Gettysburg find its footing (read about that here), and Halloween was huge for us... but after Halloween, we all knew, attendance would drop like a rock, as tourists fled to warmer climes or sought out Christmas shows.  If only we could find Sleepy Hollow a holiday show of their own.... Bingo!  Steve did it all himself: writing the script, adapting it into a walking tour to use the picturesque old houses and shops of historic Gettysburg as the backdrop for his solo version of Dickens' old story.  And he did the advertising himself, too.  Sleepy Hollow would handle the logistics--sales, insurance, a base of operations, hot chocolate for after the tour--but Steve would stage the PR campaign himself: he'd adapt the company logo, write the ad copy, create flyers (left) and distribute them to the local shops and hotels, create posters and put them up wherever he could, write web copy and get it onto all the midstate tourism and events-calendar websites, write a press release and get information about the tour into the newspapers and onto area radio and TV stations. In the end, the tour was a remarkable success.  Five and ten people came at a time the first year; reservations for ten, fifteen, even twenty at a time poured in the second year.  Some were scared away by the weather, especially the week before Christmas, but those who came had a terrific time.  (There is, Steve says, something uniquely gratifying about applause from people wearing thick, thick gloves.) Some of them even wrote letters.  One of them reads, in part, "Steve did an excellent job!  We'd like to walk with him again sometime....  Thanks again for a good job from Steve!"  This, Steve notes, from a young couple who came out for the walk on a night when it was barely 20 degrees out, with a howling wind dropping the wind-chill to near zero.  "Nasty cold," as the letter-writter remarked.  And yet, "We had a good time despite the cold." What higher praise is there for a walking tour in December--except, perhaps, an invitation to perform the story indoors someplace next year?