The holiday season is upon us once again, a season of good will, giving, and dealing with psychotic shoppers in the stores. Given that I don’t like crowds that much, I try to do my shopping at off-hours when the crowds aren’t at their most beastly, or order things online and avoid the crowds altogether. I made the mistake of going to Toys r’ Us last weekend looking for something on my daughter’s wish list, spending a total of five minutes in the building, not finding what I was looking for, and being rudely cutoff by other customers in the store. I guess that was my fault for wearing my “Invisible Man” Halloween costume to the store. Fortunately I left the store before I was compelled to sink my knife into someone’s ass.
Tis also the season for holiday television programming, not all of it is all that great. Naturally there are the shows you expect to see each year: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman. It’s kind of cool for me to have my daughter watching some of the same programs I did as a kid many, many years ago and enjoying them just as much—despite the crappy stop-motion animation of the Rankin-Bass programs. Unlike the “old days,” my daughter has some of these programs on DVD and can record others on our DVR. When I was a kid you had to schedule and prepare accordingly. Programs like Rudolph came on once a year, and if you missed it, you were shit out of luck until next Christmas.
The ABC Family and Hallmark channels are chock full of “holiday” movies these days. It seems all the movies they’re showing follow one of three plotlines: something threatens Santa’s ability to perform on Christmas Eve (and not in a sexual manner); Santa needs to intervene in a situation that threatens a family; Santa has a kid who’s learning the family trade. Let me tell ya, you haven’t seen quality cinema until you’ve seen Steve Gutenberg playing Santa’s son, uttering unlikely and awkward “Ho, ho, hos.”. But I’m having none of that as I write this. On my television is an episode of Adam-12, an old favorite of mine. I’ve put an Adam-12 DVD boxset on my Christmas list this year, so we’ll see if Santa (and not Steve Gutenberg) will leave it under my tree.
Christmas feels a little different this year. For one thing, for the first time ever I’ll have all my grandparents and my dad at home on the 25th. Not in the flesh, mind you, though that would be nice. All my late relatives will be home in photographic form. During the past year a number of old family photos turned up, especially last May while helping my mother with an in-town move. Old, unseen (by my eyes) family photographs were to be found in a box of pictures my mother has in her possession. I have been digitizing these old photographs, correcting any flaws or blemishes in them and adjusting the color and lighting levels as close as possible to the originals, and then having them output, framed, and hung in our hallway. It’s nice to have all my grandparents together again, even in photographic form, though it’s hard to look at the portrait of my father at the age of two, his innocent eyes looking into the camera, and knowing what life had in store for him.
It will also be the first year that I’ll get to watch the film, A Christmas Story, knowing that one of the major players in the movie is now gone. Darren McGavin, who played the Old Man, passed away last February. Oh sure, I watch plenty of movies where most, if not all, of the principal actors and actresses have long since passed away. But for some reason it’s different with this film. I first saw it in 1985 and immediately fell in love with it. Still, the twenty-four hours of A Christmas Story that runs on Christmas Day is a bit much for me.
It’s safe to say that I’m not the only one who loves the movie. Recently someone bought the house that was used for the exterior shots in the movie, renovated it, and opened it as a museum dedicated to the film. And from the looks of the pictures, they had a pretty good turnout for the grand opening at the end of November. It’s hard to say why people like me love the movie. Maybe it’s the film’s setting in 1940 America. The country wasn’t involved in the Second World War yet, things seemed more innocent despite world events at the time. Maybe we can relate to Ralphie and his experiences. How many of us dreamt of turning in an essay so good that your teacher would excuse you from all future writing assignments? How many of us have wanted that one Christmas gift so much that we’d go so far as demanding to see Santa so we can tell him personally of our request? I always wanted a guitar growing up but never got one until I was old enough to buy my own. I had to settle for footballs (Football? What’s a football?), bicycles, Big Wheels, countless G.I. Joes and accessories. My daughter put a guitar on her wish list this year. She’s only seven so I don’t think she’s quite ready for a guitar. But I found one just the right size for her and her hands, so she’s getting her equivalent of an “Official Red Ryder, carbine-action, two hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.”
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