Show and Sell

Maybe you had to be there, but it was sweet, and poignant, especially when you reflected that they would divorce and Sonny would become a Republican politician and die in that skiing accident, and Cher would become a gay icon, and -- well, things were much simpler in the 1970s, I reflected, marveling that one of their specials brought together Captain Kangaroo and Bernadette Peters. Those were the days, when they brought in little Chastity at the end, and William Conrad would deliver a homily, saying: "The most real things in the world are the things that neither children nor men can see." Because that, of course, is the other theme of Christmas television: belief.

"THE POLAR EXPRESS," "MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET": THERE IS A LONG LINE OF MOVIES AFFIRMING BELIEF AND CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE, and most have attained (or are attaining) classic status by being shown, over and over, on television. For no movie is this truer than "It's a Wonderful Life," the 1946 granddaddy of belief allegories.

Somehow I missed this staple growing up, and I looked forward to atoning for that cultural illiteracy. In the movie, which did poorly at the box office, Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, an upright man who one Christmas night undergoes a spiritual crisis, regretting a life spent running a small savings-and-loan in his hometown of Bedford Falls. Contemplating suicide, he wishes he'd never been born. An angel named Clarence shows him what life would have been like if that wish had been granted. The answer is: Life would have been very bad -- for his family and for the people of Bedford Falls. Staggering through, what else, a blizzard, George comes to value his community and his own place in it. Though hard-pressed for cash, he is rich in friendship, unlike the heartless banker Mr. Potter: "You think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well it doesn't, Mr. Potter!" sputters George. The true meaning of Christmas, like the true meaning of life, can be found in ties to other human beings and belief in a higher power. The ideal is to have, as Clarence does, the faith of a child.

It may be a telling commentary on our time that "Wonderful Life" seems to have been eclipsed, of late, as the ultimate TV Christmas movie. The successor, according to Thompson, is "A Christmas Story," which underwent a similar trajectory: It was a limited hit at the box office in 1983 but entered a successful afterlife on cable. It gently imparts what might be called the pro-commercialism argument: the view that the true meaning of Christmas is getting presents. The vehicle for the drama, a funny and nostalgic look at a wartime boyhood, is little Ralphie's desire for a Red Ryder BB gun, but the charm is getting there. Part of its TV success also may be attributable to its reliance on vignettes, which can be watched in snippets, between naps, meals or parties. It doesn't matter at what point you tune in. In my house it tends to be playing on Christmas Day, during its cable marathon and at some point every member of the family will drop onto the couch to watch some portion, even, sometimes, me.

Increasingly, though, the common language of Christmas television is being fragmented. In the cable era, almost nothing is made for everybody. One of the major purveyors of Christmas fare is ABC Family, a Disney-owned network that skews slightly older than the Disney Channel proper; it's for kids who outgrew Hannah Montana, like, 15 minutes ago. I had never appreciated just how precise cable is in its demographic targeting until I talked to the president of ABC Family, Paul Lee, who declares that "We are Christmas." That is true, he says, for a broad demographic, but this channel is really, really Christmas for its core audience, which is 14- to 28-year-olds -- the "millennial generation" or, as he calls them, the "social network generation." These kids, Lee says, are different from boomers in many ways, chief among them being that they are very bonded to family and make an effort to stay in touch with their parents. They are, he says, "passionate about families."

For those viewers, the network offers "25 Days of Christmas," which includes Christmas movies such as "The Polar Express;" regular movies, such as "The Incredibles"; and offerings from their parents' generations, including more from the Rankin/Bass oeuvre. After the success of "Rudolph," Rankin/Bass made lots more animagic Christmas specials, but, as with all sequels, some were more magic than others. One was "The Year Without a Santa Claus," which features two snazzy villains, Heat Miser and Snow Miser, both of whom have catchy song-and-dance numbers. Lee says the millennials really go for these kitschy old characters: His own boys, both "cool and vital" L.A. teenagers, always look forward to their airing. The millennials, he says, "love the nostalgia value; that's what Christmas gives you. Christmas gives everybody the justification to wallow in the glory of Christmas." Thanks to these old specials, he says, "I truly believe that we have made Heat Miser into a star again!"

Maybe. I watched some of the old Rankin/Bass with my daughter and a 13-year-old friend, and, 15 minutes into "Rudolph's Shiny New Year" (1976), the friend opened a laptop and my daughter asked if I minded if they just went upstairs. For my part, reader, I have to confess: I fell asleep.

But I swear I watched every moment of the two new ABC Family original movies they sent me, which are clearly targeted at a fairly narrow demographic. Both feature attractive young single women whose parents and siblings are driving them crazy, in a lovable and well-meaning kind of way. In "Snowglobe," a Jennifer Lopez look-alike is mortified by her stereotypically noisy and bickering Brooklyn family. She lives in an apartment building that her parents manage, and they keep selecting single male tenants with the hope of marrying her off. Sick of all of them, she becomes obsessed with a snow globe Christmas scene that features people ice skating in a Vermontish village. During a nap, she finds herself transported to this snow globe world, where she meets a young man whose eternal occupation is shoveling snow. But when snow globe guy follows her home, and turns out to be clueless and disappointingly asexual, she wants out of her fantasy world and back into her normal one, learning, sort of like George Bailey, to appreciate her family, as well as the cute new tenant down the hall.

The other, "Holiday in Handcuffs," has a similar theme: In this one, the mother figure, played by Markie Post, is almost unbearably uptight and controlling. She berates the heroine, played by Melissa Joan Hart, for her hairstyle, her clothes, her failure to be married. When the heroine's boyfriend dumps her just before he is supposed to join her for a hyper-organized family Christmas, the heroine has a nervous breakdown and kidnaps a young executive, played by Mario Lopez, who is angry at first but eventually, of course, learns to love her scatterbrained ways. At the ultimate Christmas Dinner From Hell, Controlling Mom has a breakdown, the heroine's brother comes out as gay, the sister reveals that she took her law school tuition and opened a Pilates studio, and the dad, played by Timothy Bottoms and looking distractingly like George W. Bush, freaks. But the parents go into therapy, the kidnapped boyfriend kisses the heroine, and all is well with the world. "This," says Paul Lee, "is family in all its passion and dysfunction and humor and yelling and glory . . . This is great viewing."

Perhaps, but it felt to me, in these movies, that the Christmas struggle had been diminished. In the great old shows -- okay, in the great old animated cartoon specials -- you see the individual struggling to find his place in the family of man. In these made-for-TV movies, you see a 20-something trying to find her place in her claustrophobic family. It's a smaller message, somehow, for a smaller audience.

AFTER A WHILE, THE PORTRAYAL OF MOTHERS IN CHRISTMAS MOVIES ALSO BEGAN TO DEPRESS ME. In all too many of them, the mother is the antithesis to that miracle of Christmas, childhood belief. She is the oppressor, the realist. She is rarely the innocent, rarely the fun one, rarely the person exhorting everybody to keep faith. In the 1947 version of "Miracle on 34th Street" -- in which a white-bearded man hired to play the Macy's Santa is, in fact, Santa -- it is the mother who can't accept this marvelous truth. Hard-nosed and pragmatic, she forbids her daughter, played by Natalie Wood, to believe in Santa Claus. In "A Christmas Story," it is the mother who tells Ralphie he can't have a gun, because, "You'll shoot your eye out."

This seems unfair. As I watched these portrayals, I wondered if all mothers feel as worn out as I do, trying to give children precisely the magical Christmas that Holly-wood seems to feel we are withholding from them. So I called Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, who pointed out that for mothers, particularly working mothers, Christmas creates the same unsolvable dilemma as summer vacation. It's the time of year when we most want to give our children the idyllic, relaxed, carefree experience we think we remember having, but that's impossible, given that we're working, and the kids are out of school, and the holidays themselves are a second job. It is our burden, she says, to create the holiday, and creating the holiday has never been harder. We're "rushing around shopping; we cobble together child care; inevitably, someone gets sick; it's cold. It's not just the added work. It's the expectations."