My Story About Christmas Specials (WIMTM 5)

True to my intention in a post the other day, here’s another installment of my life’s experience with an aspect of Christmas that means a lot to me.

It Was a Different World

When I was a small boy, VCRs were not yet mainstream, and I’m reasonably sure that Christmas specials packed the December broadcast network schedules more densely back then as a result. I know that people would wait for the annual airing of It’s a Wonderful Life or “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as vigorously as they would for The Wizard of Oz at some other point in the year. TV was an event back then, a true “you snooze, you lose” phenomenon.

During those years I developed early awareness of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer“, “Frosty the Snowman“, and the Grinch. I’d wait anxiously as all kids to see that spinning “Special Presentation” logo that CBS would air with the ’70s colors and majestic fanfare. Those were the days. Cable television, as well, young friends, didn’t even exist for many families (or in my case, an entire town!), and even Fox, WB, UPN, and the CW were considered start-ups or were still on the drawing board. It was a small world of the “Big Three” networks, and we were all captive audiences to their broadcasts. What’s more, my even younger friends, these networks would air seasons which ran roughly from Labor Day to Memorial Day, allowing many large holes for expected reruns and specials. December was a goldmine for specials.

Whereas now, the youth of America must cut their teeth on this treasure trove through ABC Family and the Disney Channel, we had full prime time airings of Rankin Bass classics such as “Jack Frost“, “The Little Drummer Boy“, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town“, and more, each and every year. At some point in the late ’80s through the turn of the century, I’d say, those shows stopped airing on recurring bases, and we were left to wonder, in that strange pre-YouTube, pre-DVD bargain bin world, what those specials were all about. That is, unless, you were obsessive about taping them all. That’s where I come in.

Little Ricky’s DIY Archiving Service

Enter that period where VCRs were plentiful, video cassettes were affordable, and Christmas specials were still bountiful. Add one plucky young fellow who never developed his classmates’ interest in trash-talking cartoons (this plucky young fellow, in fact, wanted to be an animator for quite some time), and after a few years you end up with a pretty sizeable collection of VHS Christmas specials. I probably had about 20 hours of programs (diligently dubbed commercial-free, of course) spread across several tapes. There wasn’t a strong need to visit those tapes very often, because specials still aired with enough frequency that one could get his fix through broadcasts alone.

But, then, in 1995, something changed my life forever, moving me from a casual participant to a full-fledged nut. That December I was a freshman in college, living alone in a dorm with a roommate whom I only swapped pleasantries with, and who wasn’t much of a student anyway. The campus was thinning out as students who had completed their final exams left for the winter break, and those who remained were mostly cloistered for studying and partying. You’ll recall from previous installments that I was a “lone-wolf” even more so back then.

I had a final or voice jury toward the end of the exam period, and terrible snow was predicted to arrive on top of the previous week’s serious amount of snow. Rather than risk the roads by coming in “just in time”, I figured it would be fun to camp out in my room, enjoy my dorm food, use the building’s practice room, and… enjoy Christmas specials. I had a sweet setup in my freshman dorm room. It had been a triple until one of my roomies left school on Labor Day weekend (yeah, seriously). Rather than push my desk a few inches across the floor, I offered the other two-thirds of the room to my roommate “Chooch”, and let it be.

Growing Up, In My Own Way

I had an already-ancient Radio Shack five-inch combination radio/black and white camping television, which probably weighed about as much as the 39″ LCDs I buy nowadays at BU. The previous weekend, I brought up a VCR. The one catch was I needed the widget which anyone from my generation knows really well, but anyone younger has never seen, the pictured TV-matching transformer that would allow a VCR’s coaxial output to connect to a television’s twin-lead antenna connections. The evening before the snow began, I headed out to the Radio Shack near Drum Hill in Chelmsford, MA, and bought myself the widget. I felt like a real adult, doing errands in my gigantic Pontiac Parisienne wagon. What a world it was. And then, I was safely in for the night, in my little galley which would also have been suitable as a Japanese hotel sleeve. I would spend the following days and nights there snug as a bug.

That year I went through all my Christmas tapes. All the aforementioned favorites you’d expect were featured, but I also dove into specials that probably only aired once in their lifetime, such as Eek the Cat‘s, Inspector Gadget‘s, and “Life with Louie“. That’s another interesting point to note for the young’uns who’ll never read this. TV creators back then weren’t making shows “for the ages”, but rather to provide something that would fit nicely around the commercials which we’d be watching live and with rapt attention. No pausing, no rewinding, and no storing for a someday convenient binge. (I often think to myself that today’s kids have never experienced the terror we’d know too well when hearing from the bathroom “It’s back onnnnnn!!!!!”)

Those were some terrible shows, but in the ensuing several years, re-watching these intended one-offs, like “Jeremy Creek” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” would remind me, momentarily, what it had meant to be a kid, and more importantly, what it would mean to become an adult. There, that snowy week, an 18-year-old watched cartoons, while studying for final exams, managing snacks on his own when the dining hall was on restricted hours, moving his car at appointed plow times, as childhood sort of drifted away.

Intentional Nostalgia-Building

As I found yesterday, while reminiscing on the sounds of the season, it turns out that only a handful of the Christmas specials I have seen deserve to stand the test of time. They’ve been around longer than I have, and have no doubt earned their placement in the pantheon. It’s only by chance of technology (my VHS tapes then, YouTube now) that the rest of them have ever even seen the light of day after their initial broadcasts. And as I found yesterday, there was a period where I wondered how I would keep up hoarding this media as I grew older and busier, and as procedures became more difficult (if you’ve observed the comparative ease at archiving to tape versus trying to free a digital file from a DVR, you know what I mean).

But, then, reality came to me. I honestly don’t know if “Prep & Landing” or “Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas” have any poorer production value or writing than, say, “Life with Louie”, which I’ve come to love. One thing I do know is that I have no emotional tie to them, and never will. Louie makes me laugh, it’s a good enough show to keep my attention for twenty minutes while decorating the tree or addressing Christmas cards, year after year, but I now see (and this is literally a day-old realization for me) that as with Christmas music, it is memories and nostalgia, not inherent value that cause me to choose one over the other. And, as was the case in yesterday’s post, there was also a bit of a dead-period where I felt the need to buy shows on DVD and archive broadcasts, “just because”, and I find now that they suffer from undeveloped characters, lackluster animation, and, most importantly, I find that I never developed that sense of nostalgia necessary to really enjoy them.

I continue to watch whatever the Big Four serve me up each year. It remains a fun way to ring in the holiday. I like to see the latest music specials (especially the many choral concerts PBS serves up annually), and I enjoy seeing the developments in animation over time, but I think I’m forever an ’80s and ’90s kid, that’s where my heart truly lies.