Scrooge, the Grinch and Hans Gruber: the villains who steal Christmas

It is Christmas Eve in London, and Bob Cratchit is copying letters beside a fire so small it looks like a single coal. He cannot build it up, because his employer keeps the coal box in his own room. At closing time, Ebenezer Scrooge grants him Christmas Day grudgingly, grumbling about paying a day's wages for no work. Dickens published A Christmas Carol on December 19, 1843, and the holiday has had an official villain ever since. On November 13, 2026, he returns to Spanish theaters in Ti West's Ebenezer, with Johnny Depp as Scrooge and Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, according to the Paramount listing on eCartelera. The synopsis promises the usual journey through past, present and future; what the director of X and Pearl does with it, we will only know in the theater.

Scrooge is not alone on the shelf. Next to him sit the Grinch, who comes down from his mountain to take the presents of Whoville, and Hans Gruber, who seizes a Los Angeles skyscraper during the company's Christmas Eve party. All three steal Christmas, each in his own way, and the archive reads each one through a different theory: greed that calculates, belonging that never came, and an opportunity carefully studied. To explain is not to excuse, but it helps us see what the holiday they attack is protecting.

// The theoryScrooge: greed as bookkeeping

In 1968, the economist Gary Becker published “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” and proposed treating crime like any other decision: a person breaks the rule when the expected benefit outweighs the costs, counting the probability of punishment and its severity. This is the economic model of crime, and Scrooge's case file sees him as homo economicus taken to the limit: a man who reduced his life to a single variable. The unsettling part is that he commits no crime. He pays the minimum, denies the coal and scorns charity, all within the law. When two gentlemen ask him for a donation for the poor, he asks whether there are no prisons or workhouses left, and then adds:

That is his theft: turning into an expense line the one thing the holiday asks for free. Dickens does not defeat him with a sermon but with better bookkeeping. The ghosts show him the costs he never entered: the fiancée who left him because gold had taken her place, Tiny Tim's empty seat, his own bed stripped bare while his corpse still lies on it. Scrooge was not getting the figures wrong. He was wrong about what to count.

Read Ebenezer Scrooge’s full case file · Economic model of crime →

// The second caseThe Grinch: watching the party from above

In Dr. Seuss's 1957 story, the Grinch has put up with Christmas from his cave for fifty-three years. Seuss never explains why he hates it; he suggests that perhaps the Grinch's heart is two sizes too small. Later film adaptations gave him a childhood of rejection, and the Grinch's case file reads him through deficient socialization, the theory Gerald Patterson formalized in 1982 on the foundations of the social control tradition. Travis Hirschi had set it out in 1969, in Causes of Delinquency: we do not offend because we are bound by attachment to others, commitment, involvement and shared beliefs. Someone with no bonds has nothing to lose.

The Grinch dresses up as Santa Claus and takes the presents, the trees and even the roast beast. The next morning, the Whos of Whoville sing anyway. His heart grows three sizes, he brings everything back and carves the roast beast himself. If his hatred were innate, affection would not have changed him. That seeing the community together and taking a seat at its table is enough suggests that what was missing was a bond. None of this excuses him: many excluded people never steal anyone's holiday.

// The third caseHans Gruber: Christmas Eve as an opportunity

In Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), Gruber and his crew burst into the Christmas Eve party at Nakatomi Plaza and dress up a vault robbery, with 640 million dollars in bearer bonds inside, as political terrorism. Gruber's case file reads him through situational crime prevention, which Ronald Clarke systematized in 1980: crime is prevented by changing the situation, raising the effort and the risk and lowering the reward for whoever tries it. Gruber reads the theory backward, as the attacker looking for the flaw. The vault's seventh lock cannot be forced, but it gives way when the power is cut, and he knows the FBI will cut it because its protocol says so.

The film never stops to explain why he picks that night, but the situation speaks for itself: a building nearly empty, a staff gathered on a single floor and hostages with their guard down. What no blueprint accounted for was a barefoot visiting cop, John McClane, the unexpected guardian who ruins everything. Gruber ends up falling from Nakatomi Plaza.

// WhyWhy Christmas needs a villain

Émile Durkheim put it in writing in 1895, in The Rules of Sociological Method: crime is a normal social fact, and the reaction it provokes reaffirms the sentiments a community shares. Christmas stories are celebrations of belonging, and the villain marks their edges. Scrooge shuts himself out, the Grinch is shut out, and Gruber is an intruder. The two insiders are redeemed and end up at the table: Scrooge dines with his nephew Fred and the Grinch carves the roast beast. The outsider falls. The Christmas tale forgives those who do harm from inside the community and casts out those who come to plunder it.

And then there is the one who turns the holiday inside out. Winifred Notty, the governess of Virginia Feito's novel Victorian Psycho, announces on arriving at Ensor House that in three months everyone in the house will be dead, and the count ends on Christmas Day. Her case file reads her through Santiago Redondo's Triple Risk for Delinquency Model (2008), and Zachary Wigon's film reaches theaters on the same November 13 (we covered it in this analysis). Feito turns the Victorian Christmas that Dickens helped shape into a day of revenge.