Christmas television specials

Christmas specials were a big deal when I was a little kid. This was back before cable was common, back before the CW or Fox Network or any of those. We got CBS (8, in those days), ABC (5), NBC (3), and PBS (25). There was also an independent (43), and later another independent (19, which later became the Fox affiliate, I think)

Most of the channels showed relatively little kid-appealing programming (other than Saturday morning cartoons, and some afternoon cartoons on 43). So the Christmas specials were a big deal.

THIS was a big deal:



The excitement that generated. I still remember seeing that before the specials. Whether it was A Charlie Brown Christmas (which may have been on ABC? At least, I think it is now), or the Grinch, or the many, many Rankin-Bass specials, that was just the lead in, it gave the feeling of "Look, adults! We are getting something we want, instead of your boring "Dallas" or "Love Boat"

Oh, there were so many Rankin-Bass specials. Most people know Rudolph, which is probably the most famous, and lots of kids of my generation know The Year Without A Santa Claus (with the odd doggerel, based on a Phyllis McGinley poem, and this was the one with Heat Miser and Snow Miser). But there was also the backstory one on Santa Claus - Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, which sets him up as an orphan child raised by "Kringles" - a type of toymaking elf. (And again, the Rankin-Bass weird subsidiary characters are there - Burgermeister Meisterbuger as some kind of old German (or perhaps old Prussian) petty bureaucratic terror)

There were also a couple that emphasized more the actual reason for Christmas: there was one loosely based on song about the Little Drummer Boy. And Nestor the Donkey - basically, a reworking of the Dumbo story, except the long-eared creature here ACTUALLY loses his mother (she sacrifices herself in a snowstorm keeping him warm) but later goes to carry Mary on his back to the stable. And there was one called The First Christmas Snow which featured nuns (one voiced by Angela Lansbury) and a blind shepherd boy.

A lot of the specials (Rudolph, Nestor, the one with the New Year's baby, even, to an extent, the Little Drummer Boy and the Christmas Snow one) featured a character who was a bit of an outcast or was teased for some kind of difference. I always wondered about that as an adult - was it merely a convenient hook to hang a plot on, or did one of the writers experience being excluded as a child (it is said that so many Disney movies featured dead or absent mothers because his mother died rather tragically early in his career). Or maybe it was some kind of a proto-dealing-with-bullies message: in the end, all of the maligned characters wound up either welcomed into the fold, or at least being able to show their taunters that they were "better than them." (I STILL say that it's disturbing to see Santa Claus rejecting Rudolph. That rings untrue to me and bothered me as a child.)

Relatively few of the specials are still shown today. Some, like Rudolph, are, but others either had themes that the major networks might find a bit much for today's kids (Nestor's mom sacrificing herself - I don't remember being disturbed by that as a kid, but then again, I was older when that special came out) or perhaps there are more marketing-friendly specials out there. (ABC Family used to do a marathon of the specials one Saturday before Christmas; I don't know if they still do - it's been a few years since I saw it advertised). It's interesting to re-watch the ones I remember from childhood but hadn't seen for years (like Nestor) - it's easier to recapture that childhood feeling, unlike with Rudolph, which I've watched pretty much every year since I was a kid.

(Yaytime has a deeper discussion (relatively snark free, unlike some online sites) and they include the non-animagic specials that Rankin-Bass did (Frosty the Snowman and Twas the Night Before Christmas, which includes one of my favorite songs from the Rankin-Bass specials:



Okay, maybe some might argue with the theology of that. But then again, some Christian traditions speak of the believers being called to be co-redeemers of the world....)