of making Scrooge a recurring character at the time. "I just needed a rich uncle for the story I was going to do. I thought of this situation of Donald having to do with Christmas, and Donald getting involved with a bear up in the mountains. Somebody had to own this cabin he was going to, so I invented Uncle Scrooge as the owner of the cabin." Barks expanded on this in a 1975 interview: "I had to get a Christmas story going, and somehow a person just automatically goes back to the old Dickens Scrooge story, the old classic, 'cause part of the things that go along with Christmas, like the ringing of bells and singing of carols and so on, is the repetition of the old Scrooge classic. So I got to thinking of an old rich uncle, and gradually the story just kept building... I can't say where these things come from. I have a situation that has to be solved, and somehow all the parts just commence coming into my head from someplace and I just fit them together, and pretty soon I had fitted together a story of the ducks getting permission from their rich uncle to go up on Bear Mountain and use his cabin overnight. Well, that, of course, meant that the rich uncle had to have a reason for doing that, so I brought in this thought that he wanted to know whether Donald was a real brave duck, and that led to the bear, and the situation of testing Donald's courage. That's the way those stories build. I have a bunch of things that have to go into a story, and so I just keep feeling around for the best gags that fit in. It's like sewing together pieces of a shirt." Legacy Following this first Scrooge story, Barks decided that he was an interesting character, and he wanted to develop him more. This led to the June 1948 story "The Old Castle's Secret", and all the Scrooge stories to come. This story later inspired The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Part 12 by Don Rosa. In Rosa's story, which takes place on the day right after Christmas Eve, but before the dinner at Scrooge's mansion, Huey, Dewey and Louie are first officially introduced to their uncle Scrooge. Donald, however, makes references to a previous encounter between him and Scrooge.