This Thomas Kinkade Painting Uses Real-Time Tweets To Show The Holiday Spirit Isn't What It Used To Be

The artist Thomas Kinkade has made a fortune selling his idyllic Christmas paintings, which are saccharine-sweet but perfect for the holidays. In "A Victorian Christmas Carol," characters inspired by Charles Dickens stroll through a snow-covered street in their bonnets and top hats.

It got the ad agency redpepper wondering what it would be like combining late-nineteenth century folks with tweets from 2013. They took Kinkade's painting and integrated Twitter's streaming interface, calling it "Christmas on Tweet Street LIVE!"

It doesn't take long to notice how ridiculous Christmas-themed tweets, full of (mostly censored) expletives and emojis, look in a sentimental scene from the past.

Check out this brief video to see how it works:

If you spend a couple minutes on the site, watching the tweets pop up in speech bubbles over the characters' heads, you'll notice that redpepper used key words and trending topics to instill some traits into the figures. For example:

Tweets filled with exclamation points and smileys show that the woman in the red dress is happy, thankful, and a bit ditzy:

This handsome couple is returning from a day of shopping. The wife talks about her purchases while the husband complains about the ordeal:

All wishes for Santa are directed to this demanding little girl riding beside St. Nick:

All tweets referencing a memorable scene from "Home Alone" get sent to this boy playing with a dog (and all tweets referencing "yellow snow" get sent to the dog) :

The guy with the cane is a stand-in for Ebenezer Scrooge, who has updated his lexicon for the new millennium:

There are plenty more examples, and if you've got a minute or two to kill, check them out at Tweet Street LIVE!.