D is for Delay

December’s weather was disgusting in these parts—which is to say warm, with many days that a certain kind of person praises as “beautiful,” never mind what 65-degree temps in December portend for the Thwaites Glacier or the continued functioning of the jet stream. Not only was there not the remotest chance of a white Christmas, in other words, there was no sign of anything the slightest bit wintry—until, of course, the Monday the children were due back in school after their break.

Sunday, January 2 saw the arrival of one of those little “alert” triangles in my weather app. Clicking through, I read that there was a not insubstantial chance that as many as four inches of snow would fall overnight. I showed the alert to Petra but said nothing out loud, lest the children hear and start fantasizing about an extra day of winter break. The break's final day had been surprisingly free of whining about the imminence of the first school bell of 2022, and the last thing I wanted was to trigger desperate analysis of the true odds of being snowed out and whether we parents might consider allowing a “mental health day” if not.

If such a forecast were to come true, it would absolutely result in a day off for the children. As the planet’s fever continues to spike, snow is already rare and only getting rarer around here, so it is precious to children and frightening to grownups—at least to grownups responsible for the safe transportation of children to and from school.

There are parts of this country where school systems take very little notice of winter weather, but that’s because they get so much of it that they couldn’t function if they treated every bit of snowy or icy precipitation as a justification for a day off. In these parts, by contrast, it sometimes seems as though all it takes is a rumor and a snowflake to disrupt the school schedule. Then again, the streets of Waldhurst are mostly flat and get plowed pretty promptly, so the direst aspects of the situation are not always apparent to city residents. Our school system serves an entire county, though, one that is large, mountainous, and mostly rural. Weather that causes mild inconvenience here in town can pose considerably greater challenges on the two-lane blacktops that wind up- and downhill outside city limits.

Delayed openings are a lot more common than cancellations, of course. The only two flavors of these used to be one- and two-hour delays. Then, a few years back, the innovation of a three-hour delay was introduced, and these are pretty much all we ever see now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time there was a shorter one. Three-hour delays seem to provide school authorities with the perfect balance between allowing enough time for road conditions to improve, on the one hand, and not losing one of the 180 days of instruction for which they are on the hook for delivering, on the other. One person with inside knowledge once told me that, as long as students are in school in time to eat lunch, it still counts as a full instructional day.

On days with three-hour delays, Axl is fond of making the argument that he and his sister might as well stay home because “you don’t learn anything, anyway.” His point is a fair one, as far as it goes. No matter how much the day is shortened, there is no reducing the time needed for getting kids on and off of buses, through the halls to lunch and “specials,” and all of the other logistical nuts and bolts necessary to the functioning of a school. So it is instructional time that takes the hit, and—to hear the kids tell it—there ends up being barely enough time for even a few minutes of actual academic work.

Whatever, kid(s). The pandemic has shown us all the true value of school: a place to park children so parents can perform the jobs they need because they have children. Also, there is learning and then there is learning. Some learning occurs in response to formal instruction (although a good deal less than we like to think), but—as I’m always telling the kids—humans, especially kids, never aren’t learning, and there are valuable lessons available from observing grownups operating under stressful conditions. Sometimes you learn what to do, sometimes you learn what not to do, but either way you aren’t left empty-handed.

 ***

Up on Monday before dawn (how else could I find time to write these things), I saw that I had missed a call from the county schools HQ at around 9 p.m. the night before.

The local school authorities rely entirely on phone calls to communicate with parents, not only about urgent situations like snow delays and bus-route cancellations but also about the logistics of Grandparents Day, the date and time of PTO meetings, and anything else you can think of that a school system might like its constituents to know about. There used to be text and email options, but these were abandoned a few years back in favor of these phone messages, which are sometimes delivered by a robot and sometimes, occasionally redundantly, by one or another principal’s pre-recorded voice.

I accept the reasoning that, in a poor county like this one, where so many students are being raised by grandparents and other members of a generation popularly believed to be “less tech-savvy,” phone calls are the only communication mode that everyone dependably has access to. That doesn’t mean I have to like it when my phone blows up with two or three of these calls in a single night (not common, admittedly, but not unheard of, either), and I know I am not the only one. Voters around here keep declining to raise property taxes for the benefit of the school system. Although there are many and complex reasons why, I can’t help but wonder how the school system’s public image is affected (albeit subconsciously, at the margins) by its reliance on a communication method—the unsolicited phone call—that strikes many people not only as an obsolete holdover from the previous century but, increasingly, as downright rude.

***

The weather hadn’t been on my mind when I got up, but the notification of this missed call reminded me of the forecast I’d seen Sunday afternoon. Now we would get some answers. Would school be canceled? Would the children be reprieved, receive a stay of execution their return to school after winter break?

I squinted out the window into the darkness and made out only the lightest dusting of snow. When I listened to the message, I learned that, although whatever had fallen from the sky overnight hadn’t been sufficient for a cancellation, it was, unsurprisingly, plenty good enough for a three-hour delay. As usual, I wrote the news on a yellow sticky note and affixed it to the bathroom mirror, everyone’s second stop after rising.

I did feel a little sorry for the children as they filed morosely onto the school bus in the hour of 10, rather than the hour of 7. Better than nothing, from their point of view, I assumed, but still probably a disappointment and one I could sympathize with. I remember well that desperate desire for snow days and the pleasures they brought. There was not only the fun of an unexpected day off and playing outside with friends in a world transformed into something unfamiliar and magical. There was also the satisfaction of watching the grownups being shown the limits of their power, put in their place by Mother Nature.

Not only do I remember this feeling, some remnant of it still lingers in me even now. At this point, as I near the end of my fifth decade on earth, the safe assumption seems to be that it will continue doing so as long as I live. No matter how old I get, no matter how “grown up” I erroneously come to believe that I am, it seems there will always be at least a few moments when—on learning that a snowstorm is on its way, and despite the fact that, as a parent and working adult, this is likely to inconvenience me and stymie my designs for the day—I am shot straight back to my school days and filled with that old giddy hope for a world stopped and turned upside down by snow.

Parents Strongly Cautioned

It’s Christmas Eve in Kingston Falls, and things are getting out of hand. Danny’s Tavern has been invaded by riotous revelers who seem to be having trouble both holding their liquor and respecting decorum. Mr. and Mrs. Futterman’s own excavator was just used to crush them to death in their own living room, and Mrs. Deagle has just been launched from a second-story window as a result of the uncontrolled acceleration of her (sabotaged) chair lift.

Call the sheriff if you’d like, but not only is he corrupt—the kind of man who, in uniform, pressures a local vendor for a free Christmas tree for the station—he has also shown himself to be a coward, frantically rolling up his cruiser’s window and driving away as Santa is mauled in the street.

As if civil society weren’t already hanging by a thread, there is something seriously wrong with the mailbox outside the rectory. 

But the worst is yet to come.

***

Yes, this holiday season found the Oakes family watching Gremlins, Axl (12) for the second time and Belle (9) for the first.

As you may know, Gremlins is the 1984 movie that, according to legend, is 50 percent responsible for the invention of the PG-13 rating. The other guilty party is supposed to have been the contemporaneous movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Apparently it was all a misunderstanding. Whether by design or accident, the marketing campaigns for both films underplayed some elements and overplayed others, giving parents the impression that the second Indiana Jones contained nothing more than the good, clean, escapist fun of the first one and that Gremlins was a cute-creature feature à la 1982’s E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Then children started arriving home from the multiplex with wide, staring eyes, carrying tales of still-beating hearts ripped from chests and of a not-so-cute-after-all creature being exploded in a microwave. The grownups took a closer look, and soon a panic was born.

There is an interesting cultural history here, one that starts two years earlier, in 1982, when Poltergeist was first rated R only to be downgraded to PG after appeal by the filmmakers. (Everything I’m about to say on this point is drawn from a Journal of Film and Video paper by one Filipa Antunes.)  Not very many people seemed to feel, upon watching Poltergeist, that they had been somehow misled by the new PG rating, perhaps because—frights and jump scares aside—the script was extremely respectful toward the middle class, suburbia, and that quintessential American object of abstract veneration, “the family.” (Just a year or so earlier, Ronald Reagan had started talking about something called “family values,” and can it be any accident that a character in this movie is seen reading a biography of Reagan?)

The envelope was pushed further by Temple of Doom, which upped the gross-out and violence quotient quite a bit, compared to Poltergeist, but which could still be described as—if not quite family friendly—then at least friendly toward the concept of family. (See Indy’s “adoption” of the abandoned orphan, Short Round, their formation of a faux family unit with the Kate Capshaw character, Willie, and the fact that basically all of the dramatic tension in the movie has to do with whether this family unit will be protected and preserved.)

But Gremlins, quite a few more people seemed to agree, was a step too far. Not only was it a horror movie, and not only did it take the grossness of Temple even further, but it also struck some people as a direct assault on all that was good and holy about America, Christmas, and traditional middle-class family values. Set in a picturesque small town that is first sketched in Rockwellian/Capraesque terms—it’s Christmas Eve, there is snow on the ground, a family is getting ready for Christmas, and the main character is a mild-mannered young man who not only works in a bank but is also imperiled by a wealthy senior citizen with a shriveled conscience, á la It’s a Wonderful Life—Gremlins would be described by the film critic David Edelstein as like “Dante shitting all over Spielberg’s never-never land.”

That was too fun a sentence not to quote here (I found it in the Antunes article), even after I realized Edelstein was talking not about the thirteenth century Italian poet but rather Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins. And Spielberg, well, let’s talk about Spielberg: Not only was he the producer of Gremlins, he also directed Temple and “produced” Poltergeist in such a hands-on manner that many people feel he really deserves the director credit on that film. (Supposedly his contract with a competing studio was all that prevented him from taking it.) And to top it all off, having generated all of this controversy with these three movies, it was Spielberg himself who is supposed to have suggested the idea of the PG-13 rating to Jack Valenti, of the MPAA, who ran with it. A month or so later the rightwing masturbation fantasy Red Dawn entered the history books as the first PG-13 movie.

Before these eventful several years in the early 1980s, it had been widely agreed that there should be a clear dividing line between entertainment for children and entertainment for adults and that the former should include no little amount of uplift and moralizing even as it sheltered young viewers from “adult situations,” “mature themes,” and all but the most bloodless violence. This was the widespread tacit expectation of any movie rated PG: that it should, first and at least, do no harm to—and preferably actively preserve and strengthen—the bubble of innocence we like to imagine our children living within.

With the creation of PG-13, however, according to Roger Ebert (and as quoted by Antunes): “There used to be children’s movies and adult movies. Now Spielberg has found an in-between niche, for young teenagers who have fairly sophisticated tastes in horror.”

***

Special effects grow ever more realistic, viewers grow ever more desensitized to violence and gore, and, as a result, tastes and judgements concerning the appropriateness of certain movies cannot help but evolve. A movie that one generation of children finds frightening might merely charm or even bore the next. Those early Universal horror films are supposed to have actually been frightening for audiences of the 1930s and 1940s, for example, even though we must take this on faith today.

Thus, by the time the Oakes family sat down on the couch for Gremlins, a few days before Christmas, we—or at least I—had already felt it appropriate to show Axl and Belle Alien, Aliens, the first two Terminator movies, and that other well-known alternative Christmas movie, Die Hard. For that matter, the kids had also seen all three existing seasons of Stranger Things, which is rated “TV-14” but frankly seems to include at least as much violence and good bit more in the way of “mature themes” than any of those older movies. (For Belle’s sake, we did fast-forward through a few scenes of high-schoolers doing the kind of adult stuff that not very many high-schoolers actually do but which so many parents seem to fear that a television show might inspire them to.)

Having last watched Gremlins just two years earlier, I knew that it contained only the most cartoonish violence, perpetrated by and mainly against obvious puppets, and I knew also that there was not a single second of anything even resembling a sex scene.

Nonetheless, as the opening credits rolled, I had my finger ready on the fast-forward button.

The problem—the one reason to take seriously the PG-13 rating that, apparently, many people in the 1980s would have agreed that it deserved, if only it had been invented yet—comes about two thirds of the way through the movie. 

As the gremlins are unleashing the wave of Christmas Eve destruction I described at the top, main characters Kate and Billy have taken shelter in the ravaged lobby of the Union Savings & Trust (the very bank where Billy works, as it happens). It’s a brief scene, basically just long enough for Kate to explain to Billy—the action of the movie overlapping as it does with the “getting to know each other” phase of their burgeoning relationship—why she hates Christmas. To wit, when Kate was 9, her father disappeared on Christmas Eve, only to be discovered five days later, wedged in the family’s chimney, when his corpse began to stink. Dressed as a certain jolly old elf, he was apparently the victim of his own pathological desire to perpetuate the Santa story for his children, by any means necessary.

This is a horrifying story, to be sure, but even this scene would not have been enough to make me reach for the remote—at least, not the portion of the scene I’ve described so far. The problem is with Kate’s concluding line: “And that is how I found out there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

I wonder if a film director has ever made a bigger mistake. Dante’s decision to include this line seems even more ill-advised than David Lynch’s decision to sign on for the original Dune. Searching around now, one learns that, in general, “studio executives” wanted to cut this scene but backed down in the face of resistance from both Spielberg and Dante. Did any of these unnamed executives suggest cutting that one final line instead, as a compromise? Casual Google searching doesn’t establish this one way or the other, but today one longs for some kind of, if not “director’s cut,” then “parents’ cut” that would snip it out (and perhaps make the opening scene in the decidedly “Oriental” curio shop less racist, while we’re at it).

Why didn’t Dante just have Kate say “and that’s why I hate Christmas”? This would make even more sense than the line she was given, because belief or non-belief in Santa never otherwise comes up in the movie. The line they used has the ring of a punchline included for crude shock value, especially given that, again, this movie was rated PG. The production team wouldn’t have known during filming that the marketing department would cock up the promotional campaign so badly, but even so, they had to know that they were risking ruining Christmas for more than a few Santa-believing kids and their parents. Did they even care?

***

Axl’s eyes grew wide when I told him we’d decided to share Gremlins with Belle, who is of course still a Santa believer herself. He was so concerned, in fact, that he even took off his headphones and shifted his gaze briefly away from the screen of our iMac, where he was of course playing Minecraft, shaking his head.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll fast forward. I have a plan.”

Earlier that evening, I had consulted a website called Common Sense Media. If you are a parent of young children in the year 2022, you are probably well familiar with this site, which has its uses whether you want to push the envelope in terms of what movies and shows might be okay to share with your kids (i.e., if you are a bad parent), or whether you want to avoid anything the slightest bit inappropriate (i.e., if you are a good one).

Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as “building a digital world that works better for all kids, their families, and their communities.” The organization is mainly known for its website of ratings and age recommendations for thousands of movies, TV shows, and video games. Each title’s listing includes official staff ratings concerning the prevalence of things like violence, sex, “drinking, drugs, and smoking,” and “positive messages.” Then there are also crowd-sourced reviews submitted by both parents and kids. Each listing leads with two minimum-age-appropriateness recommendations, one the average age suggested by parents, the other suggested by kids.

Although these age recommendations can vary, and often informatively, parents and children seemed to agree on Gremlins: viewers of this movie should be at least 10 years old. Having learned over the years that Common Sense Media reviews over-represent the concerns of prudes and moralists and that it is almost always fine, as a result, to shave 2-4 years off of the resulting age recommendations, it seemed that Gremlins would be fine for 9-year-old Belle—except for that damnable Santa scene.

In fact, having seen Gremlins myself just two years earlier, the only reason I was looking it up on Common Sense Media was for help avoiding that scene. I figured that one of the saner parents on the site would have sketched out a solution, but first, I skimmed through the submitted reviews to take in the gamut of opinions.

“It’s okay, if your kids don’t believe in Santa,” warned one user. “It’s not for little kids it’s very vilante [sic, but good invented spelling, kid]”; “cringed at the swear words”; “I didn’t remember… the swearing”; “my children are 10 and 11 and would be totally freaked out”; “screen it… before showing it to your child.” One review—titled “SO WORSE THAN I REMEMBER”—sums it up thus: “Lots of killing, talks of suicide, and there’s no such thing as Santa!”

Other reviewers basically shrugged at the idea that there might be any reason not to share this movie with your children (except for, of course, The Scene). “The movie was fun but a bit violent,” said one reviewer. “Kids today might like it… though it might be a little dated,” wrote another. “Nice effects and a classic soundtrack,” a third reviewer summed up. I agreed most with the reviewer who summed it up like this: “A Christmas classic not to be missed.”

One thing I’ve noticed over my years of consuming Common Sense Media reviews is how often they express the sentiment that a given movie is “worse than I remembered,” or words to that effect. Even Common Sense’s About page brings this up: “For any adult who's shared their favorite childhood movie with their kids, only to be reminded of all the iffy scenes you didn't remember, we've been there.”

One thing I’ve never noticed is anyone reflecting on the implication. Apparently many of the things adults are so worried about in the movies and shows their kids watch went right over their own heads when they themselves were children—and in earlier, arguably more innocent eras, no less. Perhaps we overthink these matters?

Anyway, I eventually found what I was looking for, courtesy of user TanRay: “The Santa spoiler happens at around 1 hour 18 minutes into the movie. You’re welcome.”

***

Leaving aside the crowd-sourced reviews, I do want to take issue with the movie’s low rating by Common Sense staff—one out of five little green dots—in the category of “positive role models.” Did they somehow overlook Frances Lee McCain’s portrayal of Lynn Peltzer, long-suffering wife of the frustrated inventor who brings Gizmo home as a gift to their son, Billy?

So often in horror movies, female characters are deployed mainly as objects and victims, there merely to scream, run half-naked through the woods, and ultimately get stabbed to death. Mrs. Peltzer, on the other hand…

Well, let’s just say you couldn’t blame your average homemaker from feeling at least a little flummoxed at the sight her kitchen being destroyed by a pack of what look like half-bat, half-dinosaur mutants. Mrs. Peltzer, by contrast, needs only a few seconds to gather herself before she rolls up her sleeves (actually, she doesn't even waste time doing this) and starts taking care of business. 

Noticing one gremlin leaning imprudently far into some sort of blender contraption rigged up by her husband, she hits the “start” button and shreds the creature from the waist up. She repeatedly stabs a second one, Psycho-style, with a kitchen knife before spraying a third in the face with oven cleaner, backing it into the microwave, slamming its door, and cooking the creature on “high.” (This last gremlin-slaying—which results in the creature exploding inside the microwave and sending what looks like a tidal wave of split-pea soup sloshing against the glass—is what I remember seeming to concern the grownups the most, back in 1984, and may very well have been the scene that led most directly to the PG-13 rating.)

How on earth can anyone watch Mrs. Peltzer taking this brave stand in defense of her home and family, and not see a heroine for the ages?

***

Belle loved the movie, and it was no problem getting her past the scene in question. Here’s how I did it. As we started the movie, I set an alarm on my phone to go off at minute 01:18:00 of the movie, although I didn’t actually hit pause until 01:18:17, just after Billy and Kate have ducked into the ruined bank lobby and closed the door but before they settle down for a breather and start talking.

Hitting pause, I announced that I needed to “update something online for work” (a fairly normal thing for me to need to do at random times throughout the day and night) and opined that maybe those family members under the age of majority might like to take the chance to get into their pajamas. Axl, who of course understood my actual intention, went along readily, and Belle and Petra headed upstairs after him. By the time they returned downstairs, I had fast-forwarded to 01:20:42, when Mr. Peltzer is shown emerging from the gas station office where he has just traded one of his inventions for an armload of cartons of Camels, an 80’s-style Christmas present if there ever was one.

Because of this scene change, the discontinuity is not particularly jarring, and anyway, the camera does promptly cut back to an external shot of the bank as Kate and Billy cautiously reemerge. I had earlier considered the possibility of letting the scene roll and simply trying to snip off that final line, but I worried it would be too obvious that I was actually interrupting the scene before it was over. If challenged, and given everything else I'd let both children watch and hear already, what possible justification could I offer for sheltering them from a split second of mere dialog, between fully clothed characters, no less?

Having accomplished all of this, and basking afterwards in the glow of a perfect family evening, a troubling picture came to mind: Belle, over at some friend's house when a viewing of Gremlins is proposed. A conscientious grownup is aware of The Scene and wants to proceed cautiously—but then Belle says she's watched it with her parents, so that's all right then...

We made it through this holiday season without any such mishap, however. Next year, it might not even be an issue.

An Oakes Family Christmas

First things first: Belle still believes in Santa Claus. This fact was driven home excruciatingly touchingly on Christmas morning, just after she finished tearing the wrapping paper off of a blank book with leather covers and a thong for tying it closed.

“He got it for me!” she cried excitedly. “I asked him for one and he got it for me!”

“He,” of course, was Santa, and “leather journal” had been a late addition to Belle’s annual letter to the jolly old elf, and the scene made me happy and sad at the same time.

I was happy to have made her happy and happy that she is still enfolded in the loving arms of the Santa story. And yet, she is inexorably getting older, as one does. When Axl saw through Santa, he was in second grade and was less resentful at the deception than proud to have detected it, and—as it turned out—so much earlier than any of his contemporaries. How might it feel to a fourth grader? Or, if we make it around the bend of yet another year before reality shoves its grimy nose into the tent, to a fifth grader? Will she feel disadvantaged, as if everyone else has been having a laugh at her expense?

I’m not sure how I want this to go. On one hand, Belle is the family’s last believer, and I am finally old and wise enough to begin to faintly understand that, as desperately and often as I have wished no longer to have young children in the house, I will miss this kind of innocence when it is gone.

On the other hand, come next November, do I really want to be dusting off the Elf on a Shelf for the amusement of a fifth-grader? Or, my God, the year following, for a new middle-schooler? Like all things, there is a season for this kind of innocence, and that season is drawing to a close, like it or not.

All we can do is wait and see what happens.

***

The end of the year is a traditional time for totaling things up and taking stock, so, on this last day of the dread year 2021, I offer this report on the Oakes household’s holiday season.

We kicked things off earlier than usual by picking out a Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving. As I recall, we have usually waited until at least the second weekend following that feast day, but this year we slid straight from turkey-induced torpor to tromping around in the mud (December's weather has been mostly springlike around here) at the tree farm we have patronized for four or five Christmases now.

The place seems to be something of a hobby operation. For the family that owns the land, the annual tree-selling operation is clearly a treasured holiday ritual: bonfire, beer on offer, several generations of women making wreaths or engaged in other obscure tasks near the said fire, several generations of men wandering around with chainsaws or scooting back and forth on ATVs.

For several years, the casualness of the operation has made itself apparent in the fact that no actual Christmas-tree-sized trees remain on the lot. Instead, you have to squint up at 20-30-foot-tall trees and try to envision what the top 8 feet might look like in your living room. This year, Garrett, the guy who always cuts our tree, led us to the Fraser fir he said he would have picked for himself if not for several curlicued branches—curiously reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss tree—that would have met with his wife’s disapproval. (In the way of a small town, I know his wife through her marketing company; I also know his sister through her husband, a social acquaintance, and I used to work at the same organization as his now-retired aunt. There is no getting away.)

The resulting tree was perhaps our best ever, once we got it home and wrestled it into the stand: absolutely stuffed with branches, pleasingly symmetrical.

To shape the top, we ended up trimming off the Dr. Seuss branches anyway.

***

The following Friday, we headed downtown for the annual Waldhurst Chamber of Commerce Christmas Parade. It had been cancelled the year before—something about a virus—but was back in full effect this year.

By full effect, I mean the usual monotonous string of floats decorated by the Garden Club, a convertible from which waved the recently crowned Ms. Mid-State, and gleaming SUVs adorned with magnetic signs advertising local insurance agents and the like. (To be clear, I don’t mind the marching bands.)

Well, almost full effect: Although Santa rode through on our biggest fire truck, he declined to offer his lap for the children to sit on at the Y after the parade was over. Something about a virus, once again.

Also, in a marked departure not only from past parades but from virtually every other civic event or large public gathering in this state, there was almost no candy. Normally, those insurance agents and the like toss out fistfuls of the stuff as they idle along, causing the children to rush out from the sidewalk in screaming throngs to try to snatch up lollipops and Tootsie Rolls from between the wheels of the fire engines and pickup trucks rolling slowly by. But this year, not so much.

I’d heard a strange rumor that the Chamber director had directed parade participants not to throw candy this year, but no one knew why. Too much Laffy Taffy down the storm drains, gumming up the wastewater treatment plant? I work at the city and figured I would have heard if this were the case. An effort to combat the abysmal local rate of childhood diabetes? Good luck: the school shows no signs of stopping serving donuts and Pop Tarts for “breakfast.”

After the parade, we drove home and watched Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

***

This year it finally occurred to me how TV-centric are my fondest memories of childhood Christmas seasons. For the first few years after we got a television, when I was seven, my parents limited my viewing to five hours a week, but this limit could be relaxed for the holiday movies and special shows that started popping up in the TV schedule after Thanksgiving and I kept a keen eye out for anything that might lead my parents to make exceptions.

The movies I circled in the newspaper’s weekly television section were mostly hoary classics—Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.—while the shows were a mix of one-off, purpose-built holiday stories (e.g., Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown) and special holiday-season episodes of ongoing series (e.g., the Scarecrow and Mrs. King episode “The Long Christmas Eve”).

The pleasures available from any specific entries in these categories varied widely, but the real fun of watching them came from, well, watching them, together with my family, sprawled around in our basement TV room on the strange foam-rubber chairs that converted into little mattresses. These movies and shows both carried and stirred the spirit of the season, standing like little signposts along a road leading to the major destinations of, first, the last day of school before what I remember was always a solid two-week break (could it really have been that long?) and, next, the Big Day itself, with all sorts of other little pleasures along the way: the Advent calendar, the plate of marzipan and nun farts, holiday crafts and stories at the library, the ritual playing of my Merry Snoopy’s Christmas LP, and more.

But were the shows and movies themselves really any good? Probably not really—certainly not the kinds of things you would necessarily go out of your way for if you had some solid alternatives. And of course one always has solid alternatives today. I’m forever running into this obstacle when I feel the impulse to share some beloved show or movie from my childhood with the kids, only to realize that my initial warm feelings toward whatever it is may have had more to do with necessity than actual quality, and even I might rather watch something a little more, I don’t know, modern and on higher quality film stock.

Speaking of happenstance and coincidence, this also seems to be the place to drop in a fun fact I learned just a few days ago about It’s a Wonderful Life, which to be clear is actually a pretty good movie (I always have to kind of make myself start watching it but inevitably enjoy it more than I expect to) but also may only have attained its status as King of the Holiday Classics through a clerical error. That is, the studio that owned the rights to this movie inexplicably failed to renew them in 1974. This enabled the TV networks to show (and sell ads during) It’s a Wonderful Life without having to pay anyone a dime for the privilege. Maybe it would have become a classic anyway, but maybe not?

This season, we only got partway through It's a Wonderful Life. We also watched Trading Places, Home Alone, A Christmas Story, Gremlins (fast-forwarding, for Belle's sake, past the scene in which the non-existence of Santa Claus is asserted), A Christmas Carol (the 1984 made-for-television version, starring George C. Scott), the first half of Home Alone 2, and, of course, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (one of many Christmas movies that, at one point or another, shows characters watching It’s a Wonderful Life).

There were trips to the mall and to Walmart, and we also became well acquainted with the man in the "UPS Seasonal Helper" vest who kept pulling up in what looked like his personal vehicle with yet more packages from Amazon. 

 Both children wrote letters to Santa, depositing them in the special mailbox that gets set up each December on the front steps of city hall. We cooked a ham on Christmas Eve; it took twice as long as the recipe predicted. The week after Christmas, the children started studying Brazilian jujitsu.

The best gift of all: Someone vandalized a fiber optic cable and killed our internet service on Christmas afternoon, so—despite that I had for some reason become fixated on forcing everyone to watch The Matrix—we played some games, instead.