Voices: Presents from the Past

I've had an aversion to holiday music since college.

When I had to throw the annual alumni holiday mixer in my role as theatre arts department assistant, I played The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. Other than a Leon Redbone CD from my dad and the Pogues' awesome "Fairytale in New York," I couldn't be caught dead listening to the stuff. I winced during my seven-year-old daughter's school holiday program last year. Not because the kids couldn't sing, but because I really, really hate that song "Must Be Santa."

The only time I could really ever get into holiday tunes was within the context of the Rankin/Bass holiday specials. Starting with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in 1964 and continuing through to 1985's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, the quirky stop-action animation of these made for TV movies defined the meaning of the holidays for Generation X. And somehow their intensely imaginative context has managed to make even the most annoying of holiday tunes bearable.

If you haven't seen the Meiser Brothers - Heat and Snow of 1974's The Year Without a Santa Claus - strut their stuff lately, you owe to yourself to rediscover what you've forgotten. There's something about these bizarre figures, each with their crew of trippy-looking mini-misers, that helps to cheer the most bitter of hearts. I can listen to "Blue Christmas," but only while watching this movie's little children figures draw blue Christmas trees for the exhausted and disillusioned Santa Claus. And how can you not love that part when the children sanction Santa's vacation and bring him gifts instead of demanding to receive?

Think that's just a silly ridiculous dream in 2002? That kids are too jaded, too materialistic and at younger and younger ages? Perhaps not. Before she presented a single item from her wish list, my five-year-old daughter told "Santa" that she was getting him a present. What she wanted became secondary - she wanted Father Christmas to know that at our house, along with the compulsory Christmas cookies and milk (and carrots for the reindeer, of course) that he could expect to find his very own gift. That's just like the kids in A Year Without a Santa Claus, I thought. Cool. Then I realized she hasn't seen the film.

She hasn't seen very much in her four-plus years of experience, yet somehow she seems to have picked up just about everything there is to know about the "Holiday Spirit." I'm not quite sure how she's become so inclined toward generosity (I can only hope that I had something to do with it), but I'm determined to reinforce the value.

Hectic rush of the holidays or not, we're going to sit down and watch as many of those crazy old Rankin/Bass productions as possible. Cable subscribers rejoice - ABC Family is playing them almost non-stop.

The only thing better than revisiting these holiday specials, is being able to share them with a generation so new that it still believes in Santa Claus. Of all the myths we've created, it is the famous Christmas Eve ride of Santa Claus that I most wish were true. No matter how poverty-stricken or otherwise circumstantially disadvantaged children may be, they are all rewarded by Kris Kringle according to his omniscient judgment of how good they've been. It's a beautiful dream in which the daily injustices of reality have been corrected. It's the essence of the "holiday spirit," and it's what lies at the core of all of these holiday specials.

Sure they're entertaining. I can't wait to see the little Fred Astaire-voiced narrator twirl his way through Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town and hear Roger Miller's singing narration for Nestor the Long-eared Christmas Donkey. But really, it is watching the kind-hearted underdogs save Christmas despite negative attitudes or evil villians that makes me wish it were always Christmas.

So long Burgermesiter Meisterburger - you're going down. Pinocchio might screw up, but he'll come out all right in the end. There will be no Year Without a Santa Claus because we know the truth - "Anyone Can Be Santa."

--alicia grega-pikul, 19 December 2002