Season’s Bleatings #1: My Family’s Bizarre Christmas Traditions and Inside Jokes

It’s a shame that, in America, even the special features on a stop-motion Christmas classic’s DVD are politicized.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Graphic violence
- Political topics

The Death of Tradition
Rankin/Bass: Now, That's What I Call the '60s
Scrooge: The Other Adaptation
Some Very Special Features

The Death of Tradition

I’ve offered some key examples of this in the past on this blog, but the ways my family dynamic has changed since we relocated in 2013 are still a chore for me to wrap my head around, and our holiday traditions have no doubt been a casualty of them. When explaining my introduction to video games and, more specifically, Sonic the Hedgehog here, I made sure to mention the all-too-brief period in which my cousins used to visit for Thanksgiving, but that tradition ended when I was just seven or eight. That was so long ago now that I’ve been done grieving over it, but believe it or not, I’ve never quite stopped trying to treat Christmas with the same warm, nostalgic festivity as I used to—sure, my family and living situation’s radically different now, but between the media, presents, and visits to my Grandma’s on Christmas Eve, the holiday magic is still alive and well in my esteem, even if the rest of my family seems to disagree. No, see, the holiday season gives my parents (and sisters to a degree) a far more painful case of the winter blues than mine, as they’ve expressed to me the grief that brings them down every December whenever they think about having to prepare for the 25th while no longer getting to see the same relatives.

Now, it may or may not surprise you that a hardline atheist like me can maintain the same enthusiasm for a very Christian holiday, but I don’t give a shit—I’d still enjoy it if it was originally a Mormon holiday, so long as no polygamy was involved. I’d even still celebrate Hanukkah if that was already a tradition, given half my mom’s side is Jewish. Regardless, I still always find a reason to look forward to this time of year, whether that be for the cozy atmosphere, movies, music, or even those adorable hand-knit advent calendars Mom picks up from Grandma’s annual Jul Bazaars. I’ve been let down by some of RedLetterMedia’s more recent Christmas episodes of Best of the Worst, yet the yuletide wonderment still lives on as it always has! Of course, that might sound like an unconventional holiday tradition on paper, but when I say playing “The Night Santa Went Crazy” by Weird Al every year is the least bizarre tradition my family and I have picked up over the years, I’m not even scratching the surface of how our batshit senses of humor have molded our means of celebrating the most wonderful day of the year. I’ll be counting these off, but not in the same list format as, say, my childhood game post here. More like the plot events of the second Joker, which I’m surely the only one still thinking about.

Before we begin, though, I’d like to point out that my preferred music video for “The Night Santa Went Crazy” is not the official one. See, a YouTube user named TJ Morris created a stop-motion rendition for a college thesis project, and when you notice the quality and acknowledge that this was shot frame-by-frame with a 1944 Bolex camera—a typical starter device in film schools—you’ll come to love the fresh take on the song and all the little cameos sprinkled throughout. The song’s sung by Sam the Snowman reimagined as Weird Al himself; Yukon Cornelius stops by to grieve with Al over what Santa’s become; Fred Astaire delivers a package to Santa in prison; the package turns out to come from the Easter Bunny; and the present inside is revealed as a knife hidden inside a carrot for Santa to slice his way through his jail bars with and escape. Minus the original video’s X-Files cameo, this one really does compare.

Rankin/Bass: Now, That’s What I Call the ’60s

Is it possible for the very obscure historical subtext of a Santa Claus origin story to trigger one family’s ongoing association of animated Christmas classics with Nazis? The answer, while surprising, is yes. Yes, it is. It’s true that Rudolph was the first Christmas movie I ever loved or saw as a tradition—either that or A Charlie Brown Christmas, but we’ll get to that one later in this section—and just about everyone knows it’s the story of a misfit triumphing over adversity by turning his “problem” into an attribute. However, our jokes on and reactions to it have been molded by (a) the hilariously of-its-time writing and execution, (b) the cruel portrayals of wholesome Christmas icons like Santa, and (c) the other Christmas specials we’ve watched by the same studio, or at least the only other one we ever really loved. Aside from adult reindeers like Donner and Comet embodying either Tracey Ullman’s Homer Simpson or Howard Cosell—in other words, the most ’60s and ’70s adults ever written or acted—there’s ongoing hints of sexism in the writing, like Donner decreeing that going out to look for your own missing kid is “man’s work” and the men having to “get the women” back to town after the supposed death of Yukon Cornelius, but this is all some of the stuff we laugh along with. I mean, this was something that first aired in ’64. How could they know any better? These moments go right along with details like Hermy and Yukon’s apparent narcolepsy (they turn off the light in their cabin on the Island of Misfit Toys and fall asleep instantly), King Moonraiser’s guard being just the spotted elephant in a bellhop cap, Hermy luring Bumbles out of his cave by saying “oink, oink, oink” with zero effort, the toys getting sucked into Santa’s bag at the very end like a vacuum, and Santa becoming fat within minutes that give the special the same charm as Sonic Adventure—the dated quality is part of the magic.

The part where we start to say “what gives?!” is when Rudolph is being laughed at and left out of the reindeer games, which is obviously how the story’s supposed to go—honestly, I still tear up a little hearing Clarise’s song “There’s Always Tomorrow” about this very plot point—but if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be looking down on this perfectly competent reindeer other than Hermy and Yukon, it’s Santa. Hell, he actually shames his dad Donner by telling him, “What a pity—he had a nice takeoff, too!”, as though that shouldn’t be the quality of Rudolph’s that matters the most to him. Some might argue he shames Donner for covering up Rudolph’s nose, but if he really had Rudolph’s back as Santa Claus should, he would’ve had it at that moment. After all, Santa’s just an enormous dick the whole movie, from cancelling Christmas due to a storm—he lives on the North Pole and has presumably been delivering presents through even worse storms for centuries—to when the elves perform a rousing number in the form of “We Are Santa’s Elves”. He acts begrudging the whole time, tells them it “needs work,” storms off, and slams the door behind him. Mrs. Claus even tells the elves not to mind what he said, and the coach complains that it sounded terrible because “the tenor section was weak,” whatever the fuck that means. I’m sure the composer, singers, and musicians performing the actual song for the soundtrack were glad to hear that.

Now, when I say my family still refers to this iteration of Kris Kringle as “Nazi Santa”, that comes from both our warped senses of humor—our dad’s the same man who’d been workshopping the sequel to Rugrats Go Wild!, Rugrats in Iraq, in which Chucky gets his legs blown off by a land mine, since I was seven—and the other Rankin/Bass movie we grew up on. While it seems we’ve actively avoided others like Jack Frost, The Little Drummer Boy, and The Year Without a Santa Claus for some unknown reason, we’ve held onto Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town like Hitler to Mickey Mouse, and given the first face you see in that one is that of Fred Astaire, it’s arguably even more ’60s than Rudolph. It’s here we meet a greater Christmas icon than Rudolph, Santa, or Bill O’Reilly, and that’s the Burgermeister Meisterburger, the Sombertown mayor with a strict anti-toy policy. This is a man who refuses to step out the door without lederhosen on, and his soldiers literally wear German World War I helmets, so when you have them set piles of toys ablaze like they’re books, the post-war influence on the movie is undeniable. Hell, if you wanna go that far, you could even interpret the Burgermeister remembering how much he loves yo-yos but having to give them up anyway as analogous to Hitler’s complicated relationship with Mickey Mouse, but if you’d rather not… well, that’s okay, ’cause neither has my family. Regardless, the end of the movie sees the town dispose of any trace they have of him and his reign—that right there’s a post-Hitler and De-Stalinization double whammy—but when I was eight, I asked what happened at the end while we were watching it, and not only did my sister Liv give the blunt answer of “They all die,” but my dad added on that the Burgermeister came back to massacre the cast with a machine gun. Thus, the idea for a future article in this blog’s database tab about “Demeisterburgerization” was born, which will chronicle his rampage and death at the hands of Bumbles that would go on to inspire The Revenant. Look, stranger things have happened in history.

That’s only what I’ve chosen to get out of this, though, as most of our laughter comes from future Mrs. Claus’s ultra-psychedelic musical number that feels like it was performed at Woodstock rather than in a Christmas movie. Meanwhile, in recent years, my eldest sister Em’s seen more value in using the motivational number “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” in real-life contexts and sending the below meme to the family’s group conversation. The latter might be a close second to “The Night Santa Went Crazy” in holiday hilarity.

Besides, as unfairly mean-spirited as Rudolph is toward its titular character, you really only get angry that Santa isn’t more supportive of him. The adversity’s the whole idea behind the movie, after all. On that note, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which I’ve known and loved about as long as Rudolph and the original animated 1966 Grinch adaptation, mostly just makes me feel sad when I watch it nowadays. Most of my adoration is directed toward Vince Guaraldi’s soothing soundtrack, most of which I can play year-round and resonate with, but that’s honestly a little unfair of me, as the movie’s still unquestionably adorable. One of my favorite little details is when Sally’s voice actress pauses awkwardly in the middle of her “All I want is my fair share” line, and they take the time to animate the character to account for that pause. Of course, as someone who empathizes with Charlie, who knows he should be feeling happy during this time of year but can’t deny his depression—hell, he’s even trying to be a creative leader for a play full of bored slackers who wants to avoid the vapid commercialization of the holiday season, in case he wasn’t relatable enough—he’s continuously insulted and shamed by the entire cast, with even Linus telling him he’s the only person who can turn a time like Christmas into a problem. Something a fair chunk of people can call bullshit on, including my parents. While I enjoy Lucy’s fake therapy segment for this reason and totally get the conflict surrounding the tree, it’s still incredibly depressing. Even after Linus recontexualizes the holiday for Charlie and the rest of the cast using the story of the nativity, it clearly doesn’t do much to help his outlook, considering so much as the tree getting weighed down with an ornament is enough for his mood to spiral down once again. No, in the end, it takes the rest of the cast giving up on being dicks to him for no good reason and supporting his choice to pick the sad little real tree over hideous fake ones to rejuvenate him. Really makes this clip from A Charlie Brown Celebration oddly gratifying, doesn’t it?

Scrooge: The Other Adaptation

Yeah. Uh-huh. I get it. You’re part of the vast majority of people who hear me name an adaptation of A Christmas Carol and assume I’m referring to Scrooged. No, Bill Murray is not the lead in this 1970 British TV movie. If Disney’s A Christmas Carol—one of the more faithful film versions of the Charles Dickens classic—is the black sheep of takes on A Christmas Carol for its uncanny valley factor (which I never took issue with because, by that logic, you could say modern video games suffer from the same problem), then Scrooge is the red-headed stepchild. It’s never been the source of critical acclaim, and those who do know about it believe the musical numbers are corny and subpar, for which my family will forever hold a visceral loathing toward them. This is a beloved tradition of my family’s the same way A Muppet Christmas Carol is for other families, and funny enough, it might be just as accurate to the original book. The almost irredeemable lead is portrayed by British film and theater star Albert Finney, who you’d never guess was fairly young at the time as his old-age makeup, with a rat’s nest for hair and filth under his fingernails, holds up on a level comparable to Max von Sydow’s in The Exorcist. We’ll sidestep how disturbingly Trump-esque his visage is in hindsight and get to my few complaints about the accuracy, given I’ve always admired the character of Ebenezer Scrooge for being written with such understanding for how he became the way he is by an author with a perfectly reasonable grudge against the rich. While I think Disney’s A Christmas Carol gets a tad too over-the-top and unfocused at times, it’s no doubt a more faithful adaptation, especially given the portrayals of certain spirits. I’ll always love and get a kick out of Sir Alec Guinness as Jacob Marley in Scrooge for his dainty movements—especially considering, you know, the actor was gay in real life—they presumably didn’t have the budget to accurately render the Ghost of Christmas Past, so they interestingly decided to settle for making it an upper-class elderly woman. Therefore, I can’t dog on it too harshly, but I also give Disney’s take credit for capturing the youthful man and sentient candle with a flame for a head that Dickens originally envisioned. I also have a soft spot for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come’s depiction as a silent shadow as well as horror segments like the two sickly children under the Ghost of Christmas Present’s robe, considering the latter’s in the book and fits the spooky ghost story premise, even if Scrooge did replace that spirit’s haunting exit with something a touch simpler and more profound.

It’s important to note that, while I can understand why some critics might not look upon the musical numbers in Scrooge too kindly, I’m nostalgic for them by design, and even the not-so-great child singers fail to detract from such otherwise wonderful melodies. I feel like a million occurrences in every day of anyone’s life can be related to “I Hate People”, certainly the most cynical and even vulgar number, but others like “Christmas Children”, “I Like Life”, and “Thank You Very Much” are too catchy to not receive even a little admiration. Plus, between periods of levity like Scrooge revisiting Fezziwig, tasting the Milk of Human Kindness (something I’m fairly certain isn’t in the original book, though it has been a while since I last read it), and the entire ending, Albert Finney carries this childlike peppiness that makes such a despicable character oddly cute, and the ridiculousness of his delivery and wincing face during those segments is a never-ending point of laughter for my family. Hell, if you’re into minute details like I am, knowing the actor playing the Ghost of Christmas Present was tiny in real life makes the forced perspective incorporated during his segment that much more impressive, even if you can see the strings moving them about in HD.

Then again, this is a tradition of my family’s we’re talking about, so our admiration for it does surround some of the more, uh… inexplicable details. See, the film has a frightening yet visually intriguing Hell sequence during the climax, where Scrooge meets Marley in a jagged red cave system of sizzling hot rock. He’s taken to his cell, which is an icy rendition of his office, and a team of sweaty red actors in balaclavas wrap a gigantic chain around him. Thus, Marley’s threat about the chain Scrooge had been building for himself through his sins pays off in a way it hasn’t in other adaptations, due to no sequence like this existing in any of them. The odd part? I was always familiar with it throughout my life, but seeing as my parents first saw the movie as children, they only saw this scene once in theaters before it was cut from every subsequent screening. Presumably, it was only added back when the film was released on home media decades later, so, yeah… looks like this film’s comparable to the ’64 and ’65 versions of Rudolph, where certain scenes were cut for decades until home media restored them. You can read about that broadcast oddity on my beta content post here due to YouTuber Lane’s video on the subject having been blocked for copyright reasons because YouTube’s a fucking cesspit, hence why I turned to blogging. In fact, if you think that’s the only urban legend my family’s invented around this very specific TV movie, think again, as there’s an extra during the Fezziwig ball flashback who, while his identity is still unknown to this day, we refer to him as the “Clapping Man”. And, of course, by “we”, I mean “mostly just Em”. Some Christmases ago, while we were watching the movie, Em reminded us of a character she remembered from her youth in the ’90s, claiming he cannot be unseen once you notice him. Sure enough, next to young Scrooge during the “December the 25th” musical number, a very upbeat party guest in a yellow tie and tailcoat just sorta bobs around playfully despite not even coming close to being the intended focus of the shot, but there’s at least two in which he’s all too prominent due to being vastly overqualified for the part. If you’ve seen, met, or gone to high school with this chap, then please comment down below. A lot of very strange infidels are looking for him.

It’s also important to note that, with this and other Christmas movies of ours, there have been simple one-off jokes that some of us were young enough to laugh so hard at that they’ve immortalized themselves in our histories with the movies forever. You have another detail like the Hell scene that exists solely in Scrooge, that being a ghostly carriage driver in Scrooge’s mansion before Marley reveals himself, calling “Merry Christmas, ‘govnah! Merry Christmas!” and vanishing through the wall. For some reason, when I was seven or eight, I could not stop laughing at Dad responding with, “That’s a strange-looking ice cream truck”, but I can hazard a guess that it involved him tricking me into taking five THC gummies. There were also a number of other movies we watched on some Christmases but weren’t fond of enough to make traditions—The Homecoming and Frosty the Snowman being two prime examples, the former of which was too old for anyone younger than Em—as well as masterpieces I’d seen like The Snowman (the 1982 animated short film, not the Michael Fassbender flop) that my family never quite got into. Then, there was a very surreal viewing experience where Em and her husband Alex showed Mom and I the Jim Carrey Grinch adaptation, which Liv has always adamantly refused to watch because she relates the way the Grinch was bullied as a kid to her own grade school experiences. What followed was a volley of drunken laughter from Em and Alex and silent befuddlement from Mom and I, given we all had such reverence for the charming and simple 1966 Boris Karloff original, and this was… well… exactly the immature acid trip we would’ve expected from the Grinch as reimagined by Jim Carrey. Hell, I even penned the concept for a Christmas special of my comic series ElectroNuke titled “Snow Good Deed”, where the villains from the Richmond Republic pin a staged jewelry store robbery on the heroes by disguising themselves as recruits from their military (it’s a long story, but it’s essentially as revenge for what they think had permanently affected the west coast’s climate), and other than them rappeling down the ventilation shaft just like the Grinch down the chimney, I even envisioned an animated adaptation that used “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” during that whole sequence.

Then again, I feel there’s one more noteworthy topic to devote the end of this post to, and believe me: it does get even stranger.

Some Very Special Features

I can understand if you just realized movies like Home Alone and A Christmas Story haven’t become traditions in my family and now never wish to hear about these dysfunctional nutcases again—hell, you might want to mutilate them to know they outwardly dislike those movies—but the strangeness doesn’t just permeate throughout the films that have. Sometimes, it even infects the media that comes with them. Just as a starter, the first may be recognized by those who grew up watching movies like the original 1966 Grinch on VHS, but back when special features used to play with the movie instead of being selectable from the menu, our copy of this classic was always followed immediately by another animated Dr. Seuss adaptation from only a few years later: the 1970 rendition of Horton Hears a Who! No, it was just as cute and simple as the movie it came with. It did not star Jim Carrey or Steve Carell, feature a twerking elephant, end with a grating cover of REO Speedwagon, or turn into an anime for absolutely no reason. No filler, no pandering. A kid yells “YOP!”, Horton’s punishers realize a civilization does exist on a speck of dust, and they all go home happy. Thank god I’ve been able to track down blu-rays pairing the original Grinch with this stocking-stuffer, and even then, it’s viewable in full on YouTube.

Then, there’s the DVD release of Rudolph. Lane, the same YouTuber who discussed the film’s broadcast changes, also compared its home media releases in this video, and suffice it to say, he wasn’t the biggest fan of the same copy we currently own. This is mostly down to video quality, editing, color temperature, and other fine details that most of my family doesn’t give a shit about (not that I don’t find it interesting), but let’s just say there were some, errr…. extra peculiarities that we were forced to uncover ourselves. See, this release was from around 2006, so it’s clear we watched our VHS copy until an unusually later date, and while it no doubt boasted higher quality by comparison even if we should update our library with blu-ray copies, we got bored and curious many Christmases ago and decided to take a peek at the special features. For reference, we were living in our current home at the time, but Liv was still living with us, and it may or may not have been during Trump’s first presidency. Now, if that detail has you scared, then don’t worry: the features included the “Fame and Fortune” song from the 1965 cut of the film, as Lane explained in his video and I discussed in my beta content post… though, then again, two new music videos for the time followed. One was by pop band Destiny’s Child, but we were too baffled and annoyed to keep watching it, so we moved onto the second featuring Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa.

So, then, a guest popped in, and our shock set in. Everyone’s shock and my uncontrollable laughter. Happy Haitian Dog Festival!