Did you know that the Snow Miser and Heat Miser in “A Year Without a Santa Claus” were respectively based on Agnew and Nixon?
OK, I can’t find an actual citation for that, but the rumor is all over the internet. It’s just one part of the giant feedback loop between TV Christmas specials and the culture at large – like how every time I’ve helped a friend move, someone involved will look at a box and say “Fra-gi-le, must be Italian,” like in “A Christmas Story,” or a scrawny tree will inevitably draw Charlie Brown references. If you live in the US, TV Christmas specials and movie marathons are inescapable – and whether you find them heartwarming or headache-inducing, they’ve been around for a long time.
Why? Well, obviously, Christmas is the biggest retail event of the year, which goes back way before TV: “The most famous reindeer of all” got his start as a Montgomery Ward tie-in campaign, and while Coca-Cola wasn’t the first to dress Santa in red and white, it played a major role in making the image into an icon. Telling stories is good marketing, and TV has been the most popular place to tell them for most of the 20th century.
Otherwise, the weather outside usually is some variety of frightful and many of us are home and either want something we can watch with our families or something we can watch while avoiding them. Christmas might also be the only time of year when showing programs that people have seen before is a plus: It’s not repetition if it’s nostalgia. Whether we want to revisit childhood favorites, seek out assured happy endings in a potentially stressful time or just let our brains relax after shopping and socializing, we come back to the sure thing at Christmas.
In order to tap into this impulse, TV stations have taken three routes. Some, especially in the early days of TV, made their own shorter specials. Some licensed Christmas movies to show nonstop. And some, like Hallmark, launched entire franchises of full-length films based around the holidays.
Handmade gifts
Here are the real classics: the Miser Brothers, Yukon Cornelius and the Island of Misfit Toys, “all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile.” These specials are generally animated, whether that’s conventional or stop-motion, with at least one extremely earworm-y musical number and often a surprising roster of 1970s talent. (Charlie Brown’s unfortunately real child voice actors are an exception, but they’ve grown to have their own kind of awkward charm.)
Rankin/Bass – the company that took on “The Lord of the Rings” before Peter Jackson, to extremely mixed success – kicked off the phenomenon in 1964, when they brought Rudolph to NBC’s General Electric Fantasy Hour. The production scored massive ratings that kept it going beyond its intended two-year limit and tapped into what was then cutting-edge technology, using a red LED bulb for the “very shiny” nose. Rankin/Bass went on to produce a plethora of specials, including “A Year Without a Santa Claus,” which starred Mickey Rooney as the big man. I haven’t been able to find out much about its production, but Glen Weldon explained it hilariously on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, including an amazing close reading of the Miser Brothers’ songs.
A year after Rudolph, Coke sponsored a tale about another misfit: Charlie Brown. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was made in six months on a production budget of $76,000. With child actors, jazz music rather than carols (a hummed “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” at the end being the exception) and offbeat concerns, it wasn’t much like a typical Christmas program. In an underdog story that could be a Christmas special itself, CBS executives thought the cartoon would fail, only for half the country to watch it. It became a classic, quashed the fad for aluminum Christmas trees and put the network in the holiday spirit.
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” owes its success to the change in attitude Charlie Brown caused. CBS, looking for another holiday cartoon special, adapted the Dr. Seuss book. Chuck Jones’ animation overcame the author’s uncertainty about having his works adapted and Boris Karloff and Thurl Ravenscroft made the audio memorable – which left the budget more overloaded than the Grinch’s sleigh after the Whoville heist. The Foundation for Full Service Banks provided funding that would total $2,676,245.83 in today’s money and the hearts of viewers probably did grow three sizes by the end, or at least feel a good bit warmer.
On sale for the holidays
As networks proliferated and more movies came to TV in the 1970s, some opted to pull in the Christmas films that had already existed, letting viewers tune in while drinking hot cocoa from the comfort of their own sofas or wrapping last-minute presents. In the last few years, networks have included movies like “Home Alone,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Miracle on 34th Street” in their marathon lineups, but two movies stand out as pillars of the trend: “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story,” very different versions of Christmas Past that nonetheless have become seasonal staples.
A 1974 copyright error may have launched the whole phenomenon. Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” now a Jimmy Stewart mainstay and the source of jokes about what happens every time a bell rings or the horror of being a single lady librarian with glasses in the Bad Present, was a flop when it came out. Then Harold Lipton, Rashida Jones’ grandfather, made a mistake that put the film into the public domain. Stations looking for Christmas programming saw a free holiday-themed opportunity, viewers responded, and a trend was born.
Capra’s film is a poignant, almost epic story of a man’s life and the road not taken, with angels and alternate futures and a decades-long timeline. “A Christmas Story,” the 1983 movie based on Jean Shepherd’s memoirs, features a far more down-to-earth look at Christmas in the early postwar years: No angels get their wings here, but a kid does triumph over a bully and gets his heart’s desire, even if he has to go through many trials (and a pink rabbit costume) on the way.
“A Christmas Story” wasn’t a flop exactly, but it lingered in obscurity for its first decade or so. In 1991, owner Turner Broadcasting started running it on TCM, TNT and TBS, gradually ramping up the viewing opportunities until the 24-hour marathon started on TNT in 1997. In 2004, Turner switched it to TBS, then put it on both channels in 2014 and 2015. “A Christmas Story” went back to TBS-only in the generally bizarre year of 2016, then returned to both stations and has been a Christmas-Eve-to-Christmas-Day staple there ever since.
While the official “A Christmas Story” marathon is a little later, Dec. 23 is National Christmas Movie Marathon Day, an official date for people to check out the adventures of Ralphie, George Bailey or any of the more modern heroes and heroines who brought the made-for-TV holiday special under the mistletoe.
Sugar and spice
The first romantic comedy set during the Christmas season was 1940’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” a film most recently remade as the non-Christmas-themed “You’ve Got Mail” (after an AOL notification that definitely doesn’t date it at all). Since then, films like “While You Were Sleeping” and “Love Actually” have featured romance plots based on the holidays, while others like “Bridget Jones’ Diary” worked them in as major parts of a larger story. (Who hasn’t been disappointed that Colin Firth didn’t show up at a horrible family Christmas buffet?)
In 2006, Hallmark took the holiday romance to the small screen. The channel, which Hallmark had created in 2001 after decades of sponsoring shows on other networks through its Hallmark Hall of Fame, gained massive ratings success with “The Christmas Card” as well as a prime-time Emmy for supporting actor Ed Asner. Hallmark recognized a good thing and started the Countdown to Christmas in 2009. Now the Countdown starts in mid-October and Hallmark has produced 47 original holiday films for this year, up from 12 in 2013.
Outlets like Lifetime quickly picked up the trend, as did Netflix when it started its Originals. Diversity has increased, too: in 2020, Hallmark and Lifetime put LGBTQ+ couples at the center of Christmas movies for the first time. “The Christmas House” star Jonathan Bennett recalled a gay member of the crew telling him that “to have this happen, and to get to be a part of it, makes us feel so honored and special that we get to be here.” Lifetime’s 2020 lineup also included the first TV Christmas movies starring veterans and actors with disabilities, as well as the first to feature a Chinese American family.
In the last couple of years, Netflix and Lifetime have also added a little spice: Lifetime’s 2023 “A Cowboy Christmas Romance” featured implied sex and the creator says that “A Carpenter Christmas Romance,” out this year, will be even steamier. Over on Netflix, “Hot Frosty” shows the male lead topless a fair amount of the time – and has inspired a parody ad from Aviation Gin. These movies also tackle more adult themes, like grief and insecurity.
In the bleak midwinter
From the Peanuts realizing that Charlie Brown hasn’t picked “such a bad little tree” to couples overcoming misunderstandings and past trauma, holiday programming often features unexpected hope. That can enhance happy holidays, but it can perhaps be most helpful to those for whom the season features stress, grief or other hardships. When the world outside is often dark and cold, maybe it’s important for many of us to get a little escapism, or to consciously buy into sincerity.
“Hot Frosty” writer Russell Hainline said that to make Christmas movies, “You have to lean into a beautiful fantasy world in which good things happen, people support one another and fall quickly for one another, and disruptive forces that seek to exert power or make life harder for those in need will ultimately be defeated.”
Sometimes we all need to believe we’ll get that Red Ryder BB Gun.
____________________________________
Take advantage of SmartBrief’s FREE CTAM email newsletter, one of more than 250 industry-focused newsletters.