Show and Sell

And -- like its era -- "Rudolph" brought us true, and truly charged, generational conflict. "Dad, I don't like it," says Rudolph when his dad shoves the nose cap on, to which Donner replies, "You'll like it and wear it!" Donner is every 1960s father who didn't want his son to have long hair, or be gay, or go into some wack-job field like, say, computer programming. He's also a domestic tyrant. "This is man's work," he says when Mrs. Donner wants to look for Rudolph. She ignores him -- The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, one year before "Rudolph" made its debut -- and goes out to search with Clarice, the little doe who loves Rudolph. "That was just a really good story," says Thompson. It was the perfect story to affirm the value of "the underdogs, the misfits who are rejected, not only by the ruthlessness of the establishment but by Santa Claus."

And if "Rudolph" expresses the spirit of its era, so, of course, does the widely acknowledged masterpiece "A Charlie Brown Christmas." According to David Michaelis's new biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts, the gold standard of Christmas specials was born when a producer whom Schulz knew sold a Christmas show to Coca-Cola. The producer persuaded the cartoonist to let the "Peanuts" characters be drafted in an animated TV special. As with "Rudolph," part of the appeal is the quality and daring of the production, including the jazz compositions that convey the deeply mixed mood of the holiday. The children's voices also represented a departure: At the time, Michaelis points out, the norm in animated specials was to use adult actors trained to produce childish voices, but Schulz and the creative team decided to use actual children, and the result was a marvelous combination of innocence and mature insight.

The network executives were not sure if any of this would work, and they were even more nervous about the fact that Schulz, a practicing Christian, wanted to insert religious language into the special. The turning point in the narrative occurs when Linus comes onstage during the holiday play and recites the Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke. When executives previewed the show, they were underwhelmed, but Michaelis points out that when it aired, on December 9, 1965, at 7:30 p.m. -- preempting "The Munsters"--15.5 million households were watching, or almost half the viewing audience. They were blown away: children, parents, critics.

But it also became a classic because of the personality and predicament of Charlie Brown, who, like Rudolph, is oppressed by a sense of being apart from his peers. Unlike with Rudolph, the problem wasn't physical but psychological, even existential. "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus," says Charlie Brown, several decades before many of the children watching him would start taking Prozac. "Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy . . . I always end up feeling depressed."

Actually, Charlie Brown has a good reason to feel depressed: The kids around him are breathtakingly cruel. My own children picked up on this right away. Watching the show intently, and laughing in all the same places I did, they nevertheless were shocked when kids said things such as, "Boy, are you stupid, Charlie Brown!" Nowadays, elementary schools have guidance counselors and anti-bullying policies. Childhood cruelty still happens, but it isn't tacitly accepted the way it used to be. "They're really mean to him!" Robin marveled when Violet drove home the point that "I didn't send you a Christmas card, Charlie Brown!"

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" is about ostracism; it's also about anti-commercialism, which is ironic coming from a cartoonist as willing as Schulz was to license his creations. As he wanders around feeling unhappy, Charlie Brown is struck by how everybody has "gone commercial." Snoopy has enrolled in a Christmas lights contest; Lucy demands to be paid in advance for her advice, then urges Charlie Brown to accept that "Christmas is a big commercial racket." To distract himself, Charlie Brown takes on the job of directing the Christmas play, for which he needs to pick out a tree. The one he chooses is so famously scrawny that it tips over when he places on it a single ornament. The children abuse him for his choice, but Linus's soliloquy reminds them of Christmas's true origins; they take Snoopy's decorations and transform the tree, showing what faith can accomplish. According to Thompson, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" "manages to reconcile being a show about anti-commercialism, but, at the same time, it's part of the very thing that keeps the commercialism of Christmas alive." At the end, the viewer might well think: Is there anybody I've been unkind to? If so, should I send him or her a Christmas card?

Ditto for Dr. Seuss's "Grinch," another anti-commercial fable. ("Frosty" is lovely, but doesn't quite seem on the level of the other three, though it's notable that one of the main characters is a girl.) The Grinch -- read by Boris Karloff -- is a direct descendant of Scrooge, spiritual progenitor of all characters who don't get Christmas and who resent those who do. Together with his unwilling dog, Max -- the moral conscience of the story -- the Grinch tries to stop Christmas by stealing the presents of the Whos in Whoville, who amaze him when they gather on Christmas morning and sing anyway. The Grinch realizes Christmas is not about presents and decides to show his remorse by . . . giving the Whos their presents. The effect is similar to that of Charlie Brown: Watching it, says Thompson, you reflect on your own moral shortcomings, and "no sooner is that problem of guilt created in your head -- and Christmas specials are nothing if not generators of guilt -- than there's a commercial saying, 'Buy this Hallmark card if you care enough to send the very best' . . . Christmas TV is nothing if not a lubricant to the retail Christmas machine."

LIKE REALITY TELEVISION, CHRISTMAS TV IS A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR STARS, EX-STARS, NEAR-STARS, CELEBRITIES YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT, people fresh out of rehab and Barbara Eden to come together and sing Christmas carols. It's a chance for disparate members of the human entertainment family to gather for the Christmas variety show, which lives on in any number of "star-studded" holiday specials, everything from ABC's Walt Disney World Christmas parade to Lifetime's movie marathon hosted by Melissa Peterman of "Reba" and Carson Kressley of the reality show "How to Look Good Naked."

Once upon a time, the variety show -- a hosted performance of skits and songs -- was a staple of mainstream television, but as musical tastes became fragmented, it could not always deliver a broad viewership. At Christmas, though, everybody sings the same songs, regardless of whether they are Andy Williams or Anne Murray or Ashley Tisdale. You can still get a lot of the old specials on DVD from Amazon; I ordered some Bob Hope, which united the likes of Loni Anderson and Phyllis Diller in some hilariously bad comedy. And, out of morbid fascination, I ordered the 1978 Donnie and Marie Osmond Christmas show, which takes place in a cabin amid thigh-deep Utah snow and combines the talents of the numerous Osmond family members. To watch this, you need to be well fortified by nostalgia or alcohol or both. My children, who are too young for either, fled long before the Osmond males gathered to do a high-steppin' musical number in the kitchen, though my husband did watch, and idly wondered, with me, what became of the youngest Osmond brother, Jimmy.

But some of the variety spirit remains marvelously accessible; on Xmasdvd.com you can -- and should -- access one of the unlikely 1977 highlights of this format, featuring Bing Crosby and David Bowie, who joke about the multi-generation gap between them. Crosby asks Bowie if he listens to any older singers, and Bowie says, yeah, he listens to Lennon. Crosby laughs, and the two gather at a piano and sing the most exquisite medley of "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Peace on Earth."

Everybody has favorites; in some quarters there is a cult appreciation of the notorious 1978 "Star Wars Holiday Special," which brought together cast members (1978: what a year that was for Christmas television!) for a special so spectacularly lame that it never aired again, though bootleg copies remain.

To my taste, though, there is nothing to beat the old Sonny and Cher specials, which I also ordered. The shows began with their jazzy rendition of "Jingle Bells," along with trademark low-level marital bickering; in one, Sonny puts garlic over his head, calling it "Italian mistletoe," and invites Cher to kiss him. When Cher declines, Sonny eats the garlic and laughingly looms at her; Cher draws back and deadpans, "Just don't say ho, ho, ho."