“I suppose it all started with the snow… You see, it was a very special kind of snow. For when the first snow is also a Christmas snow… well, something wonderful is bound to happen.” — Narrator, Frosty the Snowman, 1969
Browsing through a TV guide recently made me remember how exciting it was to anticipate the specials that would be on TV. In our house, we never missed a year of Frosty, Rudolph, The Grinch, and Charlie Brown. The paper would publish the schedule for the shows, and my parents would tell us which nights and which channel to watch. If “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was on at 8 PM on a Tuesday, you were home and watching it, because if you weren’t, you were out of luck. Thankfully, network producers must have known what they were doing since the kiddy specials never conflicted with the Perry Como Christmas Special my parents enjoyed.
The shows back then were so different. Now, there are Christmas specials based on Disney characters and superhero movies, and toy companies produce thousands of items related to those shows. I don’t remember a single toy related to the specials when I was little. They look different, too. Rather than the computer-generated animation and digital effects of today’s shows, they featured wooden, doll-like characters. Stop-motion filming was cutting-edge tech at the time. In 1969, if you were five years old, you knew Santa was real, and Rudolph could fly, because there they were, right on television.
Looking back on those shows now, some of them didn’t age well. “The Little Drummer Boy”, a Rankin-Bass special, premiered in 1968. I remember being terrified by the scene when the drummer boy’s parents are literally burned to death by robbers in their home as they push him out the window, telling him to run for his life. Later, he is in Bethlehem, and one of his animals, a little lamb, is run over and lies motionless on the ground. That one wasn’t a favorite at our house.
In the cartoon special “Frosty the Snowman”, a bunch of unsupervised kids wander off, unnoticed by their parents, and hop into a railroad boxcar to go to the North Pole. While walking in the woods, they come across a heated glass greenhouse, because what better place is there to grow tropical flowers? When the heat reduced Frosty to a puddle with a hat, Karen was weeping hysterically, and I was usually screaming by that point as well.
These cartoons and specials were not for the faint of heart. Back then, there were a lot of villains associated with Christmas shows. Reindeer Coach Comet led the bullying of Rudolph, the Burger Meister in “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” outlawed toys, and terrorized children. In “The Year Without A Santa Claus”, estranged brothers, Heat Miser and Snow Miser, had to have a summit with Mother Nature to prevent Christmas from ending forever. A creepy magician chased Frosty and friends through the woods and only left them alone when Santa threatened to stop bringing him magic toys.
Of course, the meanest of them all was the Grinch. Besides stealing Christmas, he nearly killed his poor dog pulling that sleigh. Fortunately, in all of these specials, there is a happy ending. Frosty comes back to life, Karen gets a ride home with Santa, Rudolph is a hero, Charlie Brown turns a simple tree into the spirit of Christmas, and even the green, furry Grinch finds family and friendship.
Now we have Hallmark movies, where a city girl meets a country guy at a turning point in her life, they have hot cocoa, fall in love, and the guy always turns out to be a millionaire. There are only about five basic plots for the thousands of Christmas movies, but just once, I’d like to see the woman say, “Marry you? I have to get back to New York, you don’t even have a decent pizza place out here in Pinebark Holler.”
I suppose whether it’s a childhood memory of a flying reindeer or yet another chorus of “Do you want to build a snowman?”, there will be plenty of holiday specials to watch. I will be queueing up some older movies, starting with “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol” and ending with “A Christmas Story” because an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle and a leg lamp means that dreams do come true, at least in the movies.
