A Charlie Brown Christmas
At barely over 20 minutes, this still says more about the experience of Christmas in modern America than anything else I've seen. Not just the overt message about commercialization, but the melancholy, the alienation, the desperate pursuit of getting Christmas "right," the manic participation in rituals that no one really cares about, the sudden eruptions of religious seriousness that seem like they should be important but never actually make sense with the rest of it...and then that weird way in which it all seems to come out fine in the end. Plus Vince Guaraldi, who only seems to grow more ubiquitous with the passing decades. Sometimes I wonder if this thing didn't create modern Christmas as much as it reflected it.
At barely over 20 minutes, this still says more about the experience of Christmas in modern America than anything else I've seen. Not just the overt message about commercialization, but the melancholy, the alienation, the desperate pursuit of getting Christmas "right," the manic participation in rituals that no one really cares about, the sudden eruptions of religious seriousness that seem like they should be important but never actually make sense with the rest of it...and then that weird way in which it all seems to come out fine in the end. Plus Vince Guaraldi, who only seems to grow more ubiquitous with the passing decades. Sometimes I wonder if this thing didn't create modern Christmas as much as it reflected it.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
This is one of those works of art that's simply perfect for what it is. At the same time, the question of just what it is remains slightly elusive. Epic fantasy? Sly satire? Juvenile cute-animal fest? In some way it transcends them all. I never get bored with it, despite having it all perfectly impressed on my memory. It's also the one show that takes me back most completely to what Christmas felt like when I was seven or eight—bright, plastic, mysterious, surprising, and ultimately safe—and it seems to do the same for Nicky, as different as the world of our childhoods were.
This is one of those works of art that's simply perfect for what it is. At the same time, the question of just what it is remains slightly elusive. Epic fantasy? Sly satire? Juvenile cute-animal fest? In some way it transcends them all. I never get bored with it, despite having it all perfectly impressed on my memory. It's also the one show that takes me back most completely to what Christmas felt like when I was seven or eight—bright, plastic, mysterious, surprising, and ultimately safe—and it seems to do the same for Nicky, as different as the world of our childhoods were.
Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special
This is pretty much a satire of Christmas specials, but it's so colorful and the humor is so bent that it captures the eternal, dorky weirdness of TV, Christmas, and modern childhood better than whatever it's satirizing. A lot of it is devoted to '80s camp, with guest appearances by faded celebrities my son could never have heard of—Grace Jones, K. D. Laing, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, Little Richard, Magic Johnson, Dinah Shore—which I thought would be boring for him. But somehow the utter weirdness of them all (and his initial assumption that they were all just actors playing invented characters) only made them funnier to him. Frankie Avalon, a talking cow, and Santa Claus...all just the stuff of Christmas media madness.
"Hearth's Warming Eve" from
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
What? It's good! Nicky was the one who discovered this (no surprise), but I've adopted it as one of my own. It actually has very little to do with Christmas—the ponies' holiday pageant celebrates a national origin myth, not the birth of any equestrian savior—but it has some gorgeous evocations of winter wind and frost, the story is unlike anything I've seen in a cartoon, it's pictorially delightful, the characters are charmingly ridiculous, and it maintains that delicate balance the show strikes so well between spoofery and earnestness.
The Little Drummer Boy
Books 1 & 2
The two parts were made years apart, and the second isn't as good, and yet together they're very pleasing. The original is a pretty and affecting little thing, managing to blend High Church solemnity with the Rankin-Bass style of silly animal humor. It's quite complete in itself, but at the end we like knowing that there's more to come with the same drummer boy and the same goofy beasts. And a lot more room for slapstick in the sequel.
Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol
I was fascinated with this as a kid, I think largely because cartoons of this length and seriousness were nearly unknown on TV then. But after a few years I got bored and thought I'd never need to see it again...until my friend Joe sent it to me on a VHS tape, I showed it to Nicky for the heck of it, and he liked it. I still find a lot of it dull, but I do like those ghosts. There are moments when they're genuinely eerie, which isn't easy when they're playing off a character like Magoo.
Scrooge
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
What? It's good! Nicky was the one who discovered this (no surprise), but I've adopted it as one of my own. It actually has very little to do with Christmas—the ponies' holiday pageant celebrates a national origin myth, not the birth of any equestrian savior—but it has some gorgeous evocations of winter wind and frost, the story is unlike anything I've seen in a cartoon, it's pictorially delightful, the characters are charmingly ridiculous, and it maintains that delicate balance the show strikes so well between spoofery and earnestness.
A Christmas Story
Not many movies stand up to multiple viewings for me, but this one's so rich, not just in event and character but in detail and texture, that I always find something to enjoy even when I know exactly what's coming. What impresses me most, though, is the way Ralphie and Randy are portrayed; I usually hate Hollywood's idea of kids, but these two are unlike anything else I've seen in movies, somehow more ludicrously cartoony and more humanly believable at the same time. We never call the movie by its title. It's always, "Do you want to watch Ralphie?"
Remember the Night
Not many movies stand up to multiple viewings for me, but this one's so rich, not just in event and character but in detail and texture, that I always find something to enjoy even when I know exactly what's coming. What impresses me most, though, is the way Ralphie and Randy are portrayed; I usually hate Hollywood's idea of kids, but these two are unlike anything else I've seen in movies, somehow more ludicrously cartoony and more humanly believable at the same time. We never call the movie by its title. It's always, "Do you want to watch Ralphie?"
I asked for this one, and Nicky's going to give it a chance based on my
assurance that it's got a very different tone from most Hollywood
Christmas movies. In fact, it's from before there was
really such a thing as a "Christmas movie," from 1941, when a comedic
melodrama could make good use the holidays without having to go all preachy, cloying, and self-important. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, three
years before they generated an equally intense but very different
chemistry in Double Indemnity. Here too, Stanwyck is a bad girl
who leads the too-straight MacMurray into crime, but this time they
don't end up dead, thanks to MacMurray's oddball Indiana home folks and
the bounty and limitations of a rural Christmas. It was written by Preston
Sturges, who would very soon be writing and directing Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. Like everything else by Sturges, it's a unique blend of elements.
Babes in Toyland
(aka March of the Wooden Soldiers)
(aka March of the Wooden Soldiers)
My father introduced me to this one, and it was the movie I waited to see every year on TV from the time I was four or five years old. It's an oddity, a sentimental musical from the end of the Victorian era mashed up with Laurel and Hardy's vaguely sadistic Depression-era comedy, an oddness that I think I sensed at some level even then. Or, at least, I was haunted by some of its bizarre and even frightening elements: that Mickey Mouse imitation that could be a marionette or a monkey in a suit or God knows what; Ollie being nearly drowned in public torture; the Bogie Men with their goggling eyes and zippered backs; the wooden soldier marching with its head knocked off, a terrified child wrapped around its chest. Apparently they were images that haunted my son, too, because although he has little interest in Laurel and Hardy or their brand of comedy, he always wants to see this one.
Books 1 & 2
The two parts were made years apart, and the second isn't as good, and yet together they're very pleasing. The original is a pretty and affecting little thing, managing to blend High Church solemnity with the Rankin-Bass style of silly animal humor. It's quite complete in itself, but at the end we like knowing that there's more to come with the same drummer boy and the same goofy beasts. And a lot more room for slapstick in the sequel.
Scrooge
This is the Alistair Sim version from 1951, the Christmas Carol I kept liking after I got tired of Mr. Magoo. Nicky likes this one less than me, but he hangs in for the scariest and moodiest moments. the horror-at-Christmas tradition is one Americans never really went for but the British can still do well. This one makes nearly all the ghosts, even those miscellaneous shades whirling through the air, as scary as the spirit of Christmas future. And Sim often makes Scrooge himself the spookiest character of all.
Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
This one snuck up on us both. What happened was: back when Gene Autry had his huge hit with Rudolph, he and his people decided to cobble up another Christmas song to exploit the market. They substituted a donkey for the reindeer, big ears for the red nose, and baby Jesus for Santa Claus. It was a pretty lousy song, but by the mid-'70s, when the Rankin-Bass people were running out of ideas to sustain their TV-special business, they saw something they could work with. And indeed they did: Romeo Muller turned in one of his most charming stories, the animals were funny, and Roger Miller's narrative sold it all with a strange conviction. It's not Rudolph, but it feels like a visit to his universe.
This one snuck up on us both. What happened was: back when Gene Autry had his huge hit with Rudolph, he and his people decided to cobble up another Christmas song to exploit the market. They substituted a donkey for the reindeer, big ears for the red nose, and baby Jesus for Santa Claus. It was a pretty lousy song, but by the mid-'70s, when the Rankin-Bass people were running out of ideas to sustain their TV-special business, they saw something they could work with. And indeed they did: Romeo Muller turned in one of his most charming stories, the animals were funny, and Roger Miller's narrative sold it all with a strange conviction. It's not Rudolph, but it feels like a visit to his universe.
It's a Wonderful Life
I
used to have this movie on in the background every Christmas Eve, when I'd be up until 2:00 AM
wrapping presents. Now that the present-giving has gotten a lot lighter, I almost want to let it slip away, but I can't bring myself. Every time I see it, it impresses me again with its intensity, its darkness, its raw agony, its honesty about the cruel tricks life can play. Although we don't like to look at it in our smiley-face culture, there is a frightening darkness around the edges of the Christmas story: the terror of the Imperial tax, the freezing night, the slaughter of the innocents, and the foreboding gift of the one of the Magi (Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom. / Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, / Sealed in the stone-cold tomb. / O Star of wonder, star of night...). And, of course, for any convincing story of a soul's redemption, or any myth of light emerging from darkness, the night has to grow very deep before the brightness of the star begins to shine. Capra, Stewart, and company make me feel the deep darkness more than just about any movie, and then they make its frantic redemption very nearly believable. This year I want to use it to close off the sacred season.
Which brings us to January 5th, the Twelfth Day. But then there's the Epiphany...which doesn't mean I've just had a sudden realization, it means we usually do some final Christmas rituals on January 6, the Epiphany, the celebration of the manifestation of God on earth, to seal off the holy days. That's likely to include one last movie before I put the holiday DVD box on that shelf in the corner of the basement, where it must go untouched until the day after Thanksgiving. Nicky's likely to push for The Nightmare Before Christmas or How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the Chuck Jones version, of course), but I feel like wallowing a little longer in old Hollywood. My two candidates are:
Miracle on 34th Street
Yeah, it gets a bit tiresome with repeated viewings, but I'll always have a fascination for the era of American holidays shaped around the Macy's parade, department store Santas, New York bustle, and moanings about the commercialization of Christmas when people actually seemed to care (before that itself became just another Yuletide custom). That era was still alive when I was a kid, or at least it seemed to be everyone's assumption of how the season should be, although I saw a mostly diluted and suburban-mallified version. Nicky seems to find it all interesting too, as exotica, probably the way I like movies from before 1920. And, of course, Natalie Wood is endearing, slightly troubling, and unfailingly compelling.
Not a great movie, but sweet. And Mitchum for Christmas? What could be more weirdly perfect?
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