The one reliable portent of the coming yuletide holiday is the perennial Christmas special. If you watched “classic television” back in the day (The Waltons, Little House On The Prairie etc.) there was always a Christmas episode. The variety shows of the time (Andy Williams, Jim Nabors, Carol Burnett etc.) had Christmas themed shows as well. There were one-off specials that folks looked forward to every year, like those of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And then, there were the Christmas movies and animated features.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), with Boris Karloff as the narrating Grinch, was an instant classic. It is one of my annual favorites. Chuck Jones, the animator, and Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss himself) had worked together in the Army during World War Two writing, animating and producing the “Private Snafu” training films. “SNAFU” is an Army acronym for “Situation Normal all Fouled Up” (although Army grunts shorten “foul” into another four letter “f word”). The Private Snafu training films show a Sad Sack Army private doing all the wrong things in a humorous way. When I was a history teacher at Mitchell High School, during the WWII unit, I showed some of the Private Snafu cartoons to my students and asked if they thought this amusing way of delivering a message was more effective than someone in authority, like me, “lecturing” them about it. They agreed the Jones-Geisel Private Snafu way was more successful. Boris Karloff was chosen to be the narrator of How The Grinch Stole Christmas for his distinctive voice, because of his long association with the horror genre in movies and because that association would make the Grinch’s conversion all the more dramatic. Karloff was thrilled at the offer. He loved the Dr. Seuss books, owned them all and read them to his grandkids.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) was a battle royale. Charles Schulz had penned the Li’l Folks comic strip beginning in 1947 for his hometown newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1950, Schulz approached United Features Syndicate (UFS) to reprint his Li’l Folks cartoon in papers across the country. UFS agreed but said the name of the strip would have to be changed because “Little Folks” was trademarked by another company, so UFS renamed the strip “Peanuts”. It was done without consulting Schulz, and he hated the name for the rest of his life. The strip ran from 1950 to 2000 with original ideas and storylines by Charles Schulz. He initially worked as an instructor at the Art Institute in Minneapolis and named his main character after his friend and coworker, a real person named Charlie Brown.

By the 1960’s Peanuts was a juggernaut and one of the first to capitalize (along with Walt Disney) on merchandising characters. The Coca Cola Company wanted a Christmas special from Schulz and had CBS approach him on their behalf. Schulz agreed and along with Lee Mendelson, who produced and directed the special, went to work. The finished product may be a classic today, but CBS HATED it! The piece had no laugh track, a staple of television by that time. The special used actual children to voice the kids in the cartoon lending an air of authenticity but a definite lack of professionalism. The little girl who voiced Sally (Charlie Brown’s little sister, the one sweet on Linus) couldn’t really read yet and so was fed her lines and she repeated them, for the most part. A Charlie Brown Christmas had Linus quoting from the Bible to impart the real meaning of Christmas. Religion, in a children’s Christmas special – UNTHINKABLE – so said the CBS executives. The soundtrack was primarily jazz, composed by Vince Guaraldi. CBS executives just shook their heads. If one were going to write a manual on how NOT to put a Christmas special together, Schulz et. al. just wrote it.

The CBS executives rejected it. Coke said, “We’re paying for it. We’d like to preview it.” And so, a screening was set up for the people at Coca Cola, who loved it. At the persistent insistence of Coca Cola, CBS put it on the air reluctantly, knowing what a disaster it would be in terms of ratings. It turned out that forty-five percent of the country watched the special and they LOVED it. The jazz soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi sold five million copies that year, and still sells today. A Charlie Brown Christmas won an Emmy and a Peabody award and became a holiday staple every year after that. CBS executives patted themselves on the back for airing the thing, forgetting all about their previous criticisms and predications, and contracted with Schulz to produce a series of specials for other holidays and topics.

The Claymation special, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer came out a year before Charlie Brown – in 1964. Robert May, a copy writer for the Montgomery Ward catalogue, was tasked with coming up with a Christmas promotion that would bring people into Montgomery Ward stores. The result was a story about a misfit reindeer called Rudolph who ends up saving Christmas. The book was free to customers and flew out of Montgomery Ward stores. That was 1939. In 1949, May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks converted May’s story into song. Marks was a song writer who not only wrote Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer but also; Silver and Gold, It’s a Holly Jolly Christmas, Run Rudolph Run, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and others. The song, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, was given to Gene Autry. Autry wasn’t sold on the song but his wife liked it and so, “happy wife, happy life”, he recorded it. It was a number one song the week of Christmas in 1949 and Autry’s biggest career hit. (I hope he bought his wife an extra special Christmas present that year!)

The original Rudolph special was put together in Japan, with the painstaking stop motion done there more cheaply. The audio was added in Toronto, Canada – again to save money – and the special was aired in December of 1964. The original Rudolph ending, the one that aired in 1964, simply had Santa delivering presents. The outcry and outrage over the fate of the misfit toys, apparently forgotten by Santa on the Island of Misfit Toys, from both children and adults led the animators to scrap the original ending and to replace it for subsequent airings with the one we are all familiar with today; Santa flying in to collect the misfit toys and to find homes for them. The animators hitched their wagon to merchandising and some of the most popular items were reproductions of those misfit toys.

There are other Christmas classics as well. Some of my favorites are; It Happened on 5th Avenue – about a bum and some WWII veterans made homeless because of the postwar housing crisis and how they find Christmas together; Christmas in Connecticut – a single woman magazine columnist who finds love in a madcap manner in what we would call a “rom com” today; Star In the Night – an Academy Award winning short film retelling the Christmas story with a modern twist; Trail of Robin Hood – a Roy Rogers film from 1950 about commercial Christmas tree thieves; I love Jingle All The Way which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and captures the crazy commercialism of the season; also a favorite of mine is The Shop Around The Corner starring Jimmy Stewart – that film has been remade as You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks.

It’s A Wonderful Life rounds out my list of Christmas classics. The film was released in 1946 and was the first film after World War Two for both its director, Frank Capra, and its star, Jimmy Stewart. Capra had made propaganda and training films for the US government during WWII, rising to the rank of Colonel by the end of the war. Capra was no stranger to Army life; he had also been a Second Lieutenant in World War One. Jimmy Stewart had been an Army Air Corps pilot flying twenty combat bombing missions over Germany. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other decorations, and was mustered out as a Colonel. Stewart remained in the reserves, transferring to the Air Force once that became a branch of the service in 1947 and eventually retired in 1968 as a Brigadier General. Stewart later said he would have stayed longer in the Air Force, but they kicked him out at the mandatory retirement age of 60.

Stewart and Capra had worked together before, most notably on Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Stewart was suffering from what we would now call PTSD during the course of the filming It’s A Wonderful Life. His performance is more desperate and raw in that film than fans had seen from Stewart before. Movie goers were used to a different Jimmy Stewart on screen. It’s a bit like the problem Tom Hanks has with his legion of fans when he tries to play the “heavy” in movies. The film is dark, fraught with despair and really isn’t redeemed until the final scene with the bell ringing and Karolyn Grimes (who is still alive today at age 83) as little ZuZu says, “Look Daddy, teacher says whenever a bell rings an angel gets his wings” as the community rallies around George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) in his hour of need.

It’s A Wonderful Life was a box office failure and faded into obscurity. It was nominated for five Academy Awards winning one for Best Technical Achievement. That came for making artificial snow and that technique was used in countless movies afterwards. The FBI criticized the film for making the banker, Mr. Potter, the villain of the piece. The FBI said that attacking capitalism and the upper classes in this way was a tool of communists and a subversive attempt to undermine the American way of life. The FBI seemed to ignore the whole small business and loan competition with the bank and the unethical ruthlessness of Mr. Potter not to mention Potter steals $8000 from an absent minded Uncle Billy in the lobby of the bank which is the precipitating event that causes Stewart’s character his existential crisis. The film didn’t even make half its budget back and it looked like both Capra and Stewart were washed up in the industry.

That wasn’t true of course, for either Capra or Stewart or for the film It’s A Wonderful Life. When someone goofed and let the copyright expire in 1974, the film entered public domain. That meant no licensing and royalty fees so It’s A Wonderful Life commenced its life on television in 1976 and has been a holiday staple ever since. It’s now considered one of the best movies of all time and has been preserved by the Library of Congress for its “cultural, historical and aesthetic significance”.

Spend some time with the family this festive season and establish or celebrate your own traditions, including with a holiday film of consequence to your family. In the words of another Christmas classic, “God bless us, every one.”