Show and Sell

be together? Then rushing out to get cellphones for everybody and the latest Verizon family

calling plan?

Well, yes and no. What I learned, watching seven million hours of holiday fare, is that in many ways Christmas programming is about the same themes as always. The old questions still have not been satisfactorily answered. What is Christmas about: spiritualism or commercialism? Loving your fellow man, or getting that new iPod shuffle? The message is mixed. There is usually a theme of alienation: More often than not, the dramatic engine of a Christmas program is that it is the holiday season and our hero is feeling blue and outcast, sometimes because he feels alienated from mankind, sometimes because mankind has alienated him. Look out for blizzards: They always signify a crisis of the soul. In the end, of course, alienation leads to reconciliation and forgiveness, and reconciliation and forgiveness lead to . . . a commercial break.

What's ironic, though, is that while its message often has to do with togetherness, what Christmas television accomplishes, nowadays, is separation. These days, Christmas TV often amounts to an exercise in demographic fragmentation. There is Christmas TV aimed at the mom who is multitasking, Christmas TV aimed at the single woman, Christmas TV aimed at the Comedy Central set. Once upon a time, points out Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, there were a handful of network classics that came around every year, and "everything was aimed at everybody." Now, you are not a member of the community of mankind so much as you are a member of a target demographic coveted by advertisers.

This fact was brought home when, with my son, I watched a made-for-TV movie that had been released on the Hallmark Channel a couple of years ago. The movie, which also airs this year, is "Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus." It is part of a subgenre of Christmastime romantic comedies in which the fulfillment of one's wishes boils down to: a boyfriend, maybe even a husband. In this case, it is Santa himself who is the romantic interest. Steve Guttenberg plays Nicholas, who will inherit Santa's duties from his father, but first must find a mate. He sets about looking in Southern California -- an obvious source of women who aspire to live at the North Pole -- and meets a single mom, Beth, played by Crystal Bernard. The problem is that she doesn't believe in Santa Claus, so he must persuade her to accept his identity and share his destiny.

In short, he must woo her. "When you look at him, do you ever imagine what it would be like to, you know, kiss him?" one of Beth's friends asks her. Yes, Santa has been sexualized, sort of, a prospect I found nauseating enough but which my 9-year-old son, Robin, found so unthinkable that he put a blanket over his head so he wouldn't have to see the actual kiss. "Mom, I want you to write down that this is seriously creepy," he said from under the blanket, as I was taking notes. Eventually he left, too freaked out to watch, and I found myself alone, which is how I did quite a bit of my viewing.

BLESS THEM, MY CHILDREN DID TRY. Things looked promising when I started with those classics from the 1960s, the golden age of Christmas television specials. The four all-time biggies -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "A Charlie Brown Christmas," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and "Frosty the Snowman" -- still air on network television and attract significant audiences. "These are the only television shows made during the Johnson administration that still play on prime-time TV, network, and still get great ratings," says Thompson, pointing out that other boomer favorites are relegated to rerun cable channels such as TV Land and Nick at Nite, where they resonate with a specific audience. The Christmas standards, in contrast, enjoy broad appeal. They've become a tradition in and of themselves, "every bit as much a part of some Americans' Christmas as hanging up a stocking, picking out a tree and opening presents."

Part of the reason for their popularity is that when these shows were released, in the 1960s, American television was an oligopoly of just three networks that aired to a huge percentage of the TV viewership. Nowadays, a cable network can craft a lovely made-for-TV movie, but only a much narrower slice of viewers is likely to see it.

"Back then, everybody was watching the same thing at the same time; there was one set, and everybody sooner or later saw all of these shows," Thompson says. There was also a uniquely large audience of children. When the Big Four aired, you had "millions of late baby boomers, 5 and 6 years old . . . this enormous audience of young kids who watched them and would make a point of watching them year after year." Like "The Wizard of Oz," they came on once a year. It was an occasion, an event, the equivalent of bringing the ornaments up from the basement. And by the time this massive cohort reached adulthood, watching the Big Four had become a nostalgic passion.

I was part of that audience. Every year, I would watch "Rudolph" with seasonal delight but also dread and anticipation: What if, this year, the snow monster ate Rudolph; what if, this year, bumbles didn't bounce? Each viewing, there was some exquisite detail -- the snow monster's rolling eyes, the hilariously varied breeds of the dogs pulling Yukon Cornelius's sled -- that I noticed. Then, as now, "Rudolph" is a funny and genuinely moving coming-of-age story. Rudolph, you will recall, is born with a nose that glows; his father, Donner, is so ashamed that he fashions a black nose cap to hide it, but the cap pops off, and Santa is appalled, and so are the other young reindeer, who won't let Rudolph join in, you know, the reindeer games. Ashamed, Rudolph runs away and joins a band of misfits, including Hermie, the elf who wants to be a dentist instead of a toymaker. But, afraid his nose will attract the attention of the snow monster and endanger his friends, Rudolph leaves them and wanders alone in the wilderness, as so many childhood heroes have done before him. In the end, Hermie pulls the teeth of the snow monster, and Rudolph turns out to be just the guy to guide Santa's sleigh through that blizzard -- and you remember the rest. The point being that a community learns to value difference. As Burl Ives, the snowman narrator, puts it: "They start to realize that they were a little hard on the misfits."

"Rudolph" was and remains a classic, in part, because it is so visually beautiful. It was made by Rankin/Bass, a production company that employed "animagic," a stop-motion technique in which actual toys appear to be talking and moving. "'Rudolph' is a beautiful example of 1950s, 1960s pop culture visual language," Thompson says. "The fact that these were actual dolls, they actually existed -- those deer, that Santa -- they moved in a way that was realistic enough not to be distracting, but primitive enough to almost make it seem . . . that your toy box had come to life."

But there is another reason why the story line is significant: It expresses the more inclusive spirit of its era. It's no accident that a show celebrating "nonconformity" (how many of us learned that word when Ives used it to describe what Rudolph's parents were trying to hide about him?) came out in 1964, the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which codified the idea that all people, no matter how different, must be valued and treated equally.