How we got here.

In his wonderful 2008 book The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford reveals how the triumphant success of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in 1843 placed December 25 at the center of Anglo-American bourgeois life. Before A Christmas Carol, according to Standiford, “the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter,” which is understandable, once you think about it, since Easter commemorates the unsurpassed miracle of the resurrection. Indeed, he says, the Anglican church felt that the enterprise “smacked vaguely of paganism.” The Puritans believed this, too. The Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law in 1659 that “forbade the practice and levied a fine of five shillings upon anyone caught in the act.”

Thereby establishing for all time that those grim, rigid Puritans were actually the forerunners of our present-day Progressivist Scrooges and Grinches. If you think about it, aside from religion itself the similarities are legion.

And so “there were no Christmas cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys,” Standiford writes, “no outpouring of ‘Yuletide greetings,’ no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no overblown gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior.” But there was a tradition of decorating for the holiday, and the playing of games and the staging of amateur theatricals on Christmas Day. And these were things Dickens loved as a child and summoned into his art as an adult.

By 1900, the readership of A Christmas Carol was said “to be second only to the Bible’s.” And Christmas had already become the most important holiday in the Anglo-American world – a position it retains, as we move inexorably toward the middle decades of the 21st century. It appears what Dickens did, without knowing it, was create the world’s first ecumenical religious holiday. Just as the old ad line insisted, “you don’t need to be Jewish to love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye,” you don’t need to be a full-throated believer in the divinity of Christ the Savior to love Christmas and to “keep it.” As Dickens describes, “It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that truly be said of us, and all of us!”

Keeping Christmas means being open-hearted, and thoughtful, and generous, and loving, not only to one’s own but to all of humanity. It means putting up wreaths and trees, garlanding them with lights and ornaments, buying gifts for loved ones and providing charity for the less fortunate, and gathering as family. Who could object to such a message? What logic-mad atheist could find fault with it? What Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Zoroastrian could feel all that alienated from it? We may not participate in Christmas if we are believers in another faith, but the way it has been celebrated since Dickens established its message has little or nothing exclusionary about it. That’s why I’ve always loved the Christmas season without irony or a sense of discomfort.

I may love it even more than those who keep the day precisely because I don’t. The difficulties of Christmas are unknown to me as a Jew. I haven’t had a horrible family argument under the tree or at the Christmas table, and I have never felt compelled to eat a piece of fruitcake to satisfy a deranged relative who made or brought one.

Couldn’t agree more with ol’ J-Pod about those abominable things. Ugh.

At the HQ, and it’s a good ‘un, with a focus that’s a bit…well, different from my own.

Even if you hate Frank Capra’s post-war flop about a man who finds value in his life by seeing it undone, it can be startling how starkly it reveals why good human drama can no longer be made in America. And watching it this time, I realized what The Boy and I get out of the classics and new Asian movies we’ve seen this year.

I’ve probably seen this It’s A Wonderful Life more than any other movie, and I’ve certainly written about it more than any other. The noir photography, the depths of depression it plumbs, the libertarian Pottersville-is-better-than-Bedford-Falls nonsense, and most recently, the weird stuff on Potter’s desk. The Flower, who saw it for the first time in 2016, wanted to see it last year and again this year.

What struck me this time was how deeply flawed all the characters were, with the possible exception of Mary (Donna Reed, From Here To Eternity), and yet how George’s little acts of grace (however begrudingly he accept his role) gave them the room to express the better angels of their nature.

Well, of COURSE Donna Reed is without flaw and way above reproach. I mean, damn, y’all know how I feel about that alluring, luscious woman. Follows, a list examining all the characters’ flaws and foibles, which if you never really thought of things in those terms is kind of depressing. But then we get to the meat of the thing:

One is supposed to like these people. And, shockingly enough, one does. Mr. Gower buys George his getaway luggage (that he never gets to use) but is also seen leading the bond effort to support the war at home. Sam, once he’s contacted, is ready to float George a $25K loan. Violet sticks around to help George, and apparently to brave out rehabilitating her reputation.

In other words, these people are good in spite of their occasional (or even frequent) sins. They’re real people. For all the broad stereotyping here, there’s more life in each character who passes through Bedford Falls than in any big-ticket modern Hollywood movies. They’ve all sinned, sometimes gravely, yet all are shown to be worthy of redemption.

The thing is, to have a character arc, you have to have a character who can change. The change has to be personal and material, and it has to reflect a reinterpretation of how the world works—generally the admission that one’s previous view was wrong somehow. (You can have the character change badly, of course, but that’s more a horror trope or ultra-edgy indie drama conceit.) But if there’s only one correct way to think ever, only one correct way to be, there can be no meaningful change.

And if there can be no forgiveness, a character who was wrong once can never re-enter the ranks of good guys: Old Man Gower and Uncle Billy can’t sell war bonds, Mr. Welch should be sent to jail for punching George, Violet deserves to be slut-shamed (or shamed for thinking she should be slut-shamed?) and Clarence may as well have let George jump.

You don’t have to like this movie to see that it deals more with genuine human issues than anything turned out of Hollywood in 2018.

Egg-zackly. That’s what makes the movie so danged powerful. These are real, everyday people; if you grew up in small-town America in a certain era, you know them. You’ve met them. You’ve lived among them. And if you have the least bit of wisdom about you, you acknowledge those flaws without making a big deal out of it as the citizens of Bedford Falls did, in a spirit of tolerance, humility, forgiveness, and love.

For instance, the final item in OM’s list:

The people of the town, when we see them, are quick to be manipulated by Potter. Although it is they, ultimately, who save the day, they are easily scared, gossipy, and overly-reliant on George’s good nature.

Yep. Any small-town resident of a certain age will recognize the people of Capra’s Bedford Falls immediately. Timid, easily herded by the local powers that be, many of them not just gossipy but annoyingly nosy, priggish and sanctimonious—these are all pretty standard characters found in any group of humans. I knew plenty of ’em growing up in Mt Holly, NC, and as an impatient teenage know-it-all I had little to no patience with them, even resented some of them quite bitterly. But…

BUT. The truth, in Bedford Falls and Mt Holly both, is that they were also loving, concerned, and compassionate, ready and willing to help a neighbor out any time it was needed, with anything at all, in both trivial and disastrous situations.

I remember my neighbors a few doors down, a large-ish family, a bit white-trashier than the generally upstanding, middle-class standard typical of the rest of the neighborhood. Their house was a little more run-down and sloppy than the others; the kids were always dirtier and wore more battered and patched-up clothes than most of us. The family clearly had serious problems making ends meet.

They weren’t ostracized or anything like that, they were just…well, different, and even us kids felt it, although it never bothered any of us. But here’s the thing: now and then, our parents would gather up a bunch of food—canned goods, dried beans, bags of rice, maybe some hand-me-down clothes or shoes still in good shape, whatever—put it all in a box, and quietly leave it on their front porch at night.

See, the dad was terribly embarrassed about accepting charity from anybody. Our parents knew this, and respected it. At the same time, they also knew a little occasional help was needed, and they weren’t going to let the father’s admirable pride stand in the way of giving him the assistance to keep his family going. They didn’t want to shame the guy, and they didn’t want thanks; they wanted only to help, in a way carefully calculated to avoid needlessly humbling an already humble, decent man who was struggling.

There was no neighborhood meeting about any of this; I never once heard any of our elders discuss any aspect of it, although I’m sure they must have in some fashion or other. They just did it, without looking down their noses at anybody or congratulating themselves for their generosity. The guy never knew who his benefactor had been the morning after another delivery, and that was just fine with all concerned.

I could tell you a million stories like that one about my old hometown: the time I got run over by a car on my way home from school on Valentine’s Day, when the cop who took the trouble to gather up all the valentine cards that had gone flying when I got hit and bringing them to me at my aunt’s house where I was being pampered and fussed over by pretty much the whole neighborhood. The doctor who made who knows how many house calls in the middle of the night to give me a shot for the terrible asthma I had as kid. My uncle Gene, who ran the drugstore downtown, showing up on Sundays after church even though the store was closed to fill prescriptions for those who needed them, and who kept a small pad with the ongoing arrears to be paid whenever possible, in drabs and drabs, by people who chronically found themselves a little short but still needed their medicine.

I was very happy growing up where I did…and when I hit my rebellious teen years, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It all of a sudden felt constricting to a kid who intended to see a whole heck of a lot more of the world than he ever would from within its boundaries. When I finally moved off to NYC later, it didn’t feel so much like a migration as it did a jailbreak. It was not until much later in my life that I came to accept, appreciate, and love my small-town neighbors, warts and all, as Wonderful Life so brilliantly portrayed—and to understand what my small town really was.

See, life in small-town America didn’t happen by accident, and its existence wasn’t defended and maintained without thought or intent. Small towns didn’t just happen; they were created. The people in my town, and I suspect most others, set their communities up the way they did consciously, on purpose. They believed that the old American values—religion, charity, respect for others, a determination to work hard in order to provide for their families, own their own homes, and gradually improve their lot in life—were the right ones, the best ones, the ones proven to properly uphold liberty and self-respect. They established communities wherein the father worked outside the home and the mom maintained the household and minded the young ‘uns not out of any villainous patriarchal urge to oppress women and glom all the power for themselves, but because that was the best way to raise healthy, strong, secure children to be stable and productive adults, instead of the weak, weepy, spoiled-rotten, dependent trainwrecks we see all around us today.

And they were right about all that, too. The sad decline of those communities is a HUGE factor in the dysfunction and decline of the country as a whole. That decline didn’t just happen as part of some inevitable, natural process either; it was a willful act of destruction, committed by people who knew just what they were doing, and why. It wasn’t evolution in action—it was devolution, forced upon us by Leftists with insidious intent whose plan from the start was to sow distrust, loss of belief, and shame over those wholesome, all-American values via which America had flourished for generations. Beginning in the mid-60s, the Left twisted the perception of those values and the nuclear families sustained by them from being the vital foundation necessary to a happy and fruitful life to being oppressive, inhibiting, unfulfilling, and destructive.

The success of their campaign to smear, sully, and degrade the cornerstone of American prosperity and stability is all too evident, as is the misery and destruction it has wrought on both individuals and the nation as a whole. I don’t see how we can possibly undo the damage and restore that beneficent prescription for a well-lived life to its proper place in our societal fabric. Maybe that’s just a failure of vision on my own part, I dunno. In any event, can it be the least bit surprising to any of us that the hipster-douchebag Left has for so long denigrated It’s A Wonderful Life as tedious, saccharine smarm, entirely unworthy of serious regard?

Another Christmas repost from the CF archives, this one from 2016.

Okay, while I’m hipping y’all to some good Christmas tunes, might as well share one of my all-time favorites:

But I tell you folks, if I have to hear limousine liberal Bruce Springsteen moaning and groaning his way through Santa Claus Is Coming To Town one more time like a sick hound, I am gonna kill something. There’s a tune in there somewhere, Bruce; please do us all a favor and find it, all right? Lord knows you’ve meandered around it enough. Ugh.

Look for this post to be updated for the next little while, until I get tired and go to bed. I’ma go find you guys some good Christmas music, I promise I am.

Update the First! The greatest of all possible versions of this one, which is also one of my favorites.

Update the Second! Another favorite of mine, and the most perfect version I know of. Don’t say I never gave y’all nothing.

Update the Third! One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard in my life, from wonderfully eccentric guitar genius John Fahey. I can’t find a version of this to embed that even comes close to this one, so you’ll just have to trust me and hit the link. I promise you won’t regret it. I attempted this one once onstage in New York, and failed miserably. But I play it at home all the time, and every once in a rare while I get it very nearly right.

Update the Fourth! Another of my favorites. And I mean, come on guys. It’s Sinatra.

Update the Fifth! Pretty sure I’ve presented this one here before, but what the hell. How do you go wrong with Canadian Brass? You can’t, that’s how. If this one doesn’t make you smile, well dammit, I can’t help you.

One last update! Oh, and I don’t care a whit what Rush may say: Mannheim Steamroller? Trans-Siberian Orchestra? No. Just…NO. Not now, not ever. Call me old-fashioned, call me a stick in the mud, but I prefer my Christmas music way less sinister-sounding and without synthesizers and laser light shows, thanks.

A few of y’all recommended Miracle On 34th Street in response to my Wonderful Life repost, to which I say: hey, hey, keep your shirts on, gang. I was getting to it.

So I had intended to do my next Christmas-themed post on another wonderful old classic movie, but damned if Eskiman didn’t beat me to it in the comments to the Wonderful Life post. Did a very good job of it too, thereby saving me a lot of labor, so I’m just gonna swipe it and bring it right on out here.

Another wonderful film from that era (1947) I just re-watched last night: Miracle on 34th Street with Maureen O’Hara and John Payne, Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle and a very young Natalie Wood as Susan. Do please watch it, but –SPOILERS– do follow!

It was delightful, and better by far than the much more modern version produced in 1994, though the newer one’s Richard Attenborough as Kris Kringle was excellent; in fact he was so good that the other actors’ performances appeared mediocre, which is as much as could be said. I saw this version the night before last, which is why I had to find the original; this new one left a bad taste in my mouth, which was dispelled by the beautiful Maureen O’Hara.

The original film, made in 1947, is in black & white, and reflected values of that time. Unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, it was actually bitterly cold when it was filmed; I understand that some of the cameras froze during the shoot! But the real reason it was remade wasn’t just because someone wanted to make the film in color- it was to “sanitize” it. The later version is much more PC: it has no black housekeepers and women are more than equal. For some reason I don’t know, even the department stores’ names had to be changed: the old version had Macy’s versus Gimble’s, but the new one had Coles versus Holiday Express (is there actually such a store?) The 1994 version toward the end has Fred and Doris getting married late at night in an empty church, for no particular reason. I was not impressed; the entire ending sucked in this version.

The original script was re-written, but not improved. Many changes seemed to be made just to make it different, but the changes didn’t make it better, and most made the newer film much worse. In the original, Kris Kringle’s cane was a simple wooden cane, not very heavy. Its replacement was a fancy silver-headed cane that looked like a club; someone could easily be killed with such a cane. This didn’t improve the plot, nor did other changes which made the original drunken Santa into a real bad guy and Holiday Express a viper’s den instead of honest competitors.

The original was much more light-hearted, made more sense, and the ending was much, much better: the unmarried (but very sweet on each other) couple were sent on a “short-cut” and Susan saw the house of her dreams when they arrived at a cul-de-sac; she was thrilled, and ran into the house, with Doris and Fred in hot pursuit; inside, it was just an empty house which was for sale- with a swing in the back yard! Susan knew who had arranged it all!

And Kris Kringle’s cane was propped against the fireplace.

I highly recommend the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street; accept no substitutes (because there really isn’t one.)

I couldn’t agree more; the original is another great movie of the Wonderful Life stripe, made to a standard that present-day Hollywood can’t even approach anymore and seems indifferent to at best anyway. More light-hearted than Wonderful Life (which is not necessarily to say frivolous), certainly; you won’t find much examination of weighty existential issues here, which is just fine, and shouldn’t really be scored against it.

One caveat, though: it aired on the teewee earlier today, and to my horror and disgust, it was *ULP* the colorized version. Gag me with a maggot. What a revoltin’ development.

Leaving his commie predilections and Jane Fonda out of our consideration, Ted Turner should have had his skinny ass kicked up between his shoulder blades twice daily in perpetuity for coming up with the wholly rotten idea of desecrating carefully-conceived and meticulously executed black and white films—which were framed, lit, and shot with black and white film in mind, remember—by painting over them with washed out, drab, sickly looking colors, supposedly to heighten their appeal to modern audiences anesthetized by color TV.

It kicked up quite the little controversy at the time, as I recollect, which Turner dismissed in his trademark high-handed, arrogantly ignorant fashion (“The last time I checked, I owned the films that we’re in the process of colorizing…I can do whatever I want with them, and if they’re going to be shown on television, they’re going to be in color“).

The filmmakers of the day did not consider black and white to be any sort of limitation or handicap. To the contrary: it was their palette, and the best among them were quite skilled at its use, thanks. To vandalize their purposeful art by the rough equivalent of scribbling over it with crayons is a perfect example of the sort of arrogant application of present-day standards to a long-gone era we see all over the place nowadays. Hey, given modern advances in the production of pigments, maybe somebody should go back and paint over all those Rembrandts too.

Thankfully, you don’t see those colorized obscenities nearly as much as you once did, which amounts to pretty righteous repudiation of Turner’s smug assertion that “once people start watching the colored version, they won’t bother with the original.” But having to endure Miracle On 34th Street sullied by the annoying, ugly travesty of colorization is reason enough to suspect there must have been a special place in Hell waiting for Turner upon his death all the same…and that the jerk had it coming, too.

Oh, and one more thing: if Donna Reed had any real competition as America’s loveliest woman, the magnificent Natalie Wood would have been it—with Maureen O’Hara making a credible bid herself.

Thanks to Eskyman for sharing his thoughts with us, and to Donna Reed too, because…reasons.