I have made it to December 17 without having seen one single Christmas special on TV (unless we’re counting the Simpsons rerun that aired back in September, and I’m not). I haven’t even been purposefully avoiding the television. I’ve just missed all of them. Since I’m in no mood for cutesy-vomit-SWEET this year, it’s probably a good thing.
What’s sort of perverse is that most of those TV Christmas specials are exactly the same ones that were airing when I was a kid. It’s as if the TV Gods called them all into being in 1967, and there they remain, the Eternal Christmas Specials.
If they’re a little dated, that’s probably all for the better. New animation seems a little too soulless for Christmas. At the same time, it seems odd to think that this generation of children, whose childhood experience will be so different from my own, are watching the same saccharine Christmas drip that I did. They have computerized games instead of toy soldiers, movies via satellite instead of in theatres, shopping online instead of mammoth downtown department stores — but they still plop on the floor three inches from the TV to watch Rudolph.
The Rudolph special was probably the most saccharine and yet the most endearing. Even by my junior high school years (when I no longer admitted to watching the thing but did anyway) its old stop-motion fuzzy-doll animation was starting to seem really creaky. I always identified with the misfit toys, though, and rejoiced in their triumph. If the show didn’t really make me a better and more tolerant person, it at least made me appreciate my one toy soldier who was missing an arm. (I conveniently ignored the fact that he was missing an arm because, trying to create a “real” war situation, I made land mines with balls of caps, and the poor guy’s arm got blown off. I felt bad about it, though, and pretended that he’d been awarded a little toy Purple Heart for his efforts.)
Because Peanuts transcends time and just about everything else — if Charles Schulz didn’t score a special place in eternity, I’m converting — I hold the Peanuts special to be particularly sacred. Even so, one of its main premises was already outdated by the time I was old enough to watch it, and that was about 1973.
Maybe it was Baltimore’s overwhelming German population that insisted on real trees, or maybe it was the ’70s “back to basics” crap philosophy. Everyone I knew had a real tree. The sequence of the program where they’re looking for the perfect tree and see nothing but these pink and blue shiny things struck me as surreal and nonsensical (thankfully, I now know words to describe the confusion I felt at four). My parents tried to explain about aluminum trees, but since I’d never seen one, I still didn’t really get it. It wasn’t until years later — when they started coming out of the basements and attics and returned to schlocky fashion — that I saw my first aluminum tree and finally made the connection. Modern kids have the benefit of living in the second Aluminum Tree Era, so they’ll probably get it more than I did. (I’m going take this opportunity to selectively overlook the fact that, while a little love and a security blanket fix cartoon trees, they don’t help you that bloody much in the rest of the world.)
I haven’t even seen It’s a Wonderful Life this year. Although I love the movie, I have seen it about three hundred and forty six times. When your economic circumstances are perilously similar to those that almost pitched George Bailey off the bridge and you have no Donna Reed in sight, it’s unwise to be reminded of those facts. Actually, if I did pitch myself off the nearest bridge, I’d a) land on top of a pile of coal in a B&O boxcar, and would get a free but dirty trip to New York, or b) land in the Jones Falls and end up mad, wet and cold and in desperate need of a drink.
Although I’ve blissfully been able to avoid these annual cutefests this year, it’s nice to know they’re still around. The six-year-olds of 2002 are frighteningly less innocent than I was in 1975. They can probably use a little bit of guileless pap. And I like to know that, should I need to do so at some point, I could put on footie pajamas, hold my one-armed soldier (who’s still around somewhere) and watch Rudolph again.
What’s sort of perverse is that most of those TV Christmas specials are exactly the same ones that were airing when I was a kid. It’s as if the TV Gods called them all into being in 1967, and there they remain, the Eternal Christmas Specials.
If they’re a little dated, that’s probably all for the better. New animation seems a little too soulless for Christmas. At the same time, it seems odd to think that this generation of children, whose childhood experience will be so different from my own, are watching the same saccharine Christmas drip that I did. They have computerized games instead of toy soldiers, movies via satellite instead of in theatres, shopping online instead of mammoth downtown department stores — but they still plop on the floor three inches from the TV to watch Rudolph.
The Rudolph special was probably the most saccharine and yet the most endearing. Even by my junior high school years (when I no longer admitted to watching the thing but did anyway) its old stop-motion fuzzy-doll animation was starting to seem really creaky. I always identified with the misfit toys, though, and rejoiced in their triumph. If the show didn’t really make me a better and more tolerant person, it at least made me appreciate my one toy soldier who was missing an arm. (I conveniently ignored the fact that he was missing an arm because, trying to create a “real” war situation, I made land mines with balls of caps, and the poor guy’s arm got blown off. I felt bad about it, though, and pretended that he’d been awarded a little toy Purple Heart for his efforts.)
Because Peanuts transcends time and just about everything else — if Charles Schulz didn’t score a special place in eternity, I’m converting — I hold the Peanuts special to be particularly sacred. Even so, one of its main premises was already outdated by the time I was old enough to watch it, and that was about 1973.
Maybe it was Baltimore’s overwhelming German population that insisted on real trees, or maybe it was the ’70s “back to basics” crap philosophy. Everyone I knew had a real tree. The sequence of the program where they’re looking for the perfect tree and see nothing but these pink and blue shiny things struck me as surreal and nonsensical (thankfully, I now know words to describe the confusion I felt at four). My parents tried to explain about aluminum trees, but since I’d never seen one, I still didn’t really get it. It wasn’t until years later — when they started coming out of the basements and attics and returned to schlocky fashion — that I saw my first aluminum tree and finally made the connection. Modern kids have the benefit of living in the second Aluminum Tree Era, so they’ll probably get it more than I did. (I’m going take this opportunity to selectively overlook the fact that, while a little love and a security blanket fix cartoon trees, they don’t help you that bloody much in the rest of the world.)
I haven’t even seen It’s a Wonderful Life this year. Although I love the movie, I have seen it about three hundred and forty six times. When your economic circumstances are perilously similar to those that almost pitched George Bailey off the bridge and you have no Donna Reed in sight, it’s unwise to be reminded of those facts. Actually, if I did pitch myself off the nearest bridge, I’d a) land on top of a pile of coal in a B&O boxcar, and would get a free but dirty trip to New York, or b) land in the Jones Falls and end up mad, wet and cold and in desperate need of a drink.
Although I’ve blissfully been able to avoid these annual cutefests this year, it’s nice to know they’re still around. The six-year-olds of 2002 are frighteningly less innocent than I was in 1975. They can probably use a little bit of guileless pap. And I like to know that, should I need to do so at some point, I could put on footie pajamas, hold my one-armed soldier (who’s still around somewhere) and watch Rudolph again.
posted by Daniel | 2:13 PM
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