Show and Sell
A harried mom drops her Christmas preparations to watch holiday-themed television nonstop, and learns the joys of bonding and buying

By Liza Mundy
Sunday, December 16, 2007

"YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS," I told my 12-year-old, beckoning her over to my laptop to look at a Web site I'd found called Xmasdvd.com, replete with links to Christmas television specials. Scrolling through various clips, I'd come across the old Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song, which I listened to endlessly while growing up in the 1960s. The song was featured in several animated TV specials, and here, thanks to the Internet, was one of them.

"I loved this as a kid," I told Anna, who settled in expectantly as the link took us to a YouTube clip. Here --yes! -- was that opening riff with its relentless, seasick-y rhythm; here was Dave, the trio's perennially exasperated manager, calling over and over for Alvin; here was Alvin shouting "Okay!" and joining Theodore and Simon at the microphone. Here was holiday entertainment as I remembered it, until, all at once, here was something I didn't remember at all.

"$$##!!% you, Dave!" Alvin said, stopping in mid-song and unleashing a string of profanity that I thought I must be misunderstanding. "I've been singing the same **!!#$$ Christmas song with these ##@@* chuckleheads for over 50 *@$$ years," Alvin continued, finishing with an invitation to Dave to . . . well, look it up if you want. My daughter sat dumbfounded, as stunned as if Santa Claus had come down the chimney escorted by a pair of waitresses from Hooters. "This? This is what you used to watch at Christmas?" Anna asked wanly, and I explained that, no, this was what you call a latter-day parody.

And that's when it dawned on me that something had happened to Christmas television. It had changed. It had grown up. It had been altered and YouTubed. It had been rethought and revised and digitally remastered. Something had happened to Christmas television when I wasn't watching.

OF COURSE I WASN'T WATCHING. I have a job and a family. It's amazing to me that anybody has time for television at Christmas, which is precisely the season when I am least likely to have 30 seconds to watch a Santa sleigh-ride on a Norelco razor, much less the leisure to enjoy an hour-long home-for-the-holidays special with Sheryl Crow and Reba McEntire. It's true that the gods of programming provide plenty of opportunity: Christmas TV now starts around Thanksgiving and ends well after New Year's Day, swelling and snowballing until every day seems to offer a marathon of Will Ferrell and the voice of Tom Hanks exhorting children, everywhere, to keep believing in Santa.

"We always say, 'Don't let Christmas end on Christmas Day!'" explains Pam Slay, a vice president for publicity at the Hallmark Channel, which offers holiday movies all the way to the middle of January.

Naturally, other stations are scrambling to keep up. Lifetime offers 25 days of prime-time holiday-themed movies, which is not to be confused with ABC Family's "25 days of Christmas." PBS has the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a documentary about the winter world of Yellowstone, among others; many series do holiday episodes; and the networks have mixed a potpourri that includes the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, dubious inclusions such as the "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show," and an ABC Shrek special. From a handful of staples, Christmas has become a blowout, 24/7 extravaganza. But the more it grows, the less I am able to watch it, because the expansion of the Christmas TV season means the expansion of the Christmas TV commercial season, which means the expansion of the shopping season, which means the expansion of the season, period, which imposes its massive obligations on top of the other regular duties that make up my life.

I think this inability to savor Christmas programming may be truer of women than of men, who -- I think this is fair to say -- do not seem quite as oppressed by Christmas chores. Even in the most egalitarian households, it is usually the female who does the bulk of the shopping, wrapping, card-sending, cookie-baking, planning and list-making, all while trying to finish, by December 24, the endless task of buying gifts for relatives, neighbors, friends, babysitters and teachers, plus extras in case someone gets forgotten. "Christmas is labor!" I am prone to complain as I stand boxing, wrapping and looking for tape.

And so, I decided to do some catching up. The Chipmunk-viewing was part of a project to sit down, as the rest of the world seems able to do, and saturate myself with so much Christmas programming, commercials, made-for-TV movies and recycled showings of theatrical Christmas releases that I would become imbued with holiday spirit, which, as you may have surmised, is not something I overflow with. Oh, I like Christmas perfectly well; the lights are lovely, and the trees, and the music and the Christmas story. But what I really like is spring break at the beach. Christmas is an exponential escalation of what mothers do all the time anyway: try to make other people happy.

This year, though, I would watch and watch until my heart grew three sizes that day, and my family, perhaps, would sit down and watch with me. Because, if memory serves, that's what Christmas television specials are about, aren't they? About coming together, as Jimmy Stewart does with family and friends at the end of "It's

a Wonderful Life," and realizing how lucky

you are to be alive and how happy you are to

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.

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."

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."

Good news, though: There is a cable channel that caters to our predicament. This would be Lifetime, which, according to senior vice president Tanya Lopez, targets women from ages 18 to 49. And Lifetime knows under what circumstances we'll be watching: while we're creating the holiday. "There's a lot of women that are doing their cooking, filling out their holiday cards, wrapping gifts; they're using the movie to be on as sort of comfort food," says Lopez, who suspects that women watch while "they're multitasking." And, for them, she says, Lifetime has prepared entertainment designed to "make me feel good right now. I don't want anything that makes me feel anxious."

I found that hard to believe when I watched two original Lifetime movies premiering this year: a drearier set of domestic predicaments you would be hard-pressed to find, even in Bedford Falls. One, "Holiday Switch," opens with a wife criticizing her husband, who is easy-going and loving to their children but doesn't earn enough money to give them much of a holiday. Depressed, the wife goes into the basement to do laundry, and hears voices -- don't you hate it when this happens? -- coming out of the dryer. Naturally, she crawls inside to investigate, and falls out the other side, into the laundry room and life that she would have had, if she'd married the rich guy she dated in high school. And guess what? Life with him would have sucked! Despite the pedicures! She manages to get back into the dryer, tumbles back into her own basement and, also George Bailey-like, learns to value the husband who comes to pick her up off the floor.

The other Lifetime movie I watched was "Lost Holiday," which made me want to put my head into the gas oven along with the holiday cookies. In this one, we are presented with a couple whose bickering is Olympic-caliber: Jim and Suzanne Shemwell (Dylan Walsh and Jami Gertz), estranged but not divorced, who take an afternoon just before Christmas to go snowmobiling in the Idaho mountains. Suzanne is the most controlling, most obsessively list-making mother you have ever met. When the two get lost in, yes, a blizzard, she berates her husband ceaselessly, going so far as to criticize the way he used to diaper their children, and he keeps talking about what a control freak she has always been. You want both of them to get buried in an avalanche. "Why is she doing so much shouting?" asked my husband, who is definitely not among the target demographic.

But they are saved when the community fans out to look for them, at massive expense, and their marriage is saved, as well. Over and over, the message of made-for-TV Christmas movies is that estranged family members can reconcile if only they'd show a little understanding, agree to change their personal behavior, maybe go out into a blizzard.

Or send a card. The theme of family reconciliation is perhaps most deeply ingrained in the movies made for the Hallmark Channel, which are many. "The Hallmark brand is associated with the holidays, and just about the biggest is Christmas," says David Kenin, executive vice president of programming at Hallmark, who was happy to talk about the network's extensive Christmas programming. According to Kenin, Hallmark's target demographic is broadly conceived. "Our holiday movies tend to be something a kid and their parents can both watch." And it's true, my daughter, Anna -- a spiritual if not chronological millennial who has every member of our family on speed-dial -- particularly enjoyed "A Grandpa for Christmas," in which a grandfather played by Ernest Borgnine reconciles with his family, thanks to the efforts of the plucky young heroine. (The mom in that movie is pretty sour, too.)

And there is nothing wrong with reconciliation. But what is striking is how well the medium meshes with the commercial message: It's hard to ignore the number of Hallmark movies in which reconciliation occurs when . . . somebody sends a card or a letter. Last year's most popular Hallmark movie, "The Christmas Card," features an American soldier in Afghanistan who receives a card from a young woman who sends it as part of a church project. The card sustains him, and, when he is on leave, he searches for her. He reaches her just in time to save her from marrying an unctuous, anti-family boyfriend; bonds with her dad, played by Ed Asner; and clearly will marry her and take over the family business. It's amazing, what happens when you make the effort to get out those holiday cards!

Similarly, one of this year's offerings, "The Note," begins when a plane plunges into water and, before it crashes, a passenger dashes off a note of forgiveness that later washes up on shore, tucked into a plastic bag containing Christmas cookie crumbs. A newspaper columnist, played by Genie Francis of "General Hospital" fame, discovers it and writes about her quest to find the intended recipient. Her readers are mesmerized, and soon everybody starts reconciling, sending letters, making calls, texting their parents, and, in the end, even the heroine is reconciled to someone she thought she'd lost forever. So get writing!

To be sure, television has always been embedded with commercial messages. But at Christmas, the commercialism reaches a new level of mutual reinforcement. During the rest of the year, Robert Thompson points out, TV commercials come as an interruption, but at Christmas, even the images -- trees, snowmen and, of course, gifts -- are the same. Sometimes the two are deliberately blended. This year, ABC Family has created an animated elf who will appear at the bottom of the screen during the program. During the commercial break, the elf will go full screen and, for example, prepare Betty Crocker sugar cookies. The advertisement is part of the program, and the program is part of the advertisement. The technique is called "integration." According to Paul Lee, advertisers are lining up to buy elf sponsorship. It's like the old days, when, say, George Burns and Gracie Allen praised Carnation milk on the show. We've come full circle, Lee agrees.

Everywhere, the same themes are omni-present whether it be show or advertisement: family coming together on the couch to watch a high-definition DVD player. Martha Stewart directing a project to decorate all of Macy's, herding a group of celebrity helpers. Watching, I thought: Well, great, even the commercials are giving us the bossy uber-female. I thought again how nice it would be to see even one woman whose efforts to "create the holiday" are appreciated. It's as though the season has turned us into compulsive list-makers, only to make fun of us for it. This didn't surprise Ellen Galinsky. The media, she says, have always been "fairly uncharitable" to mothers.

AND THE THING IS: WHO, REALLY, IS OPPRESSING WHOM? After stumbling upon the doctored Chipmunks special, I thought it was funny, and watched it again. Okay, I watched it several times and e-mailed a link to friends and editors ("You e-mailed it to your editors?" my daughter asked, incredulous). My son, who happened to hear parts of it, was shocked to see his mother watching a video that showcases the f-word. "Mom, I'm concerned about you," he said. (The whole project concerned him: He had a hard time believing this is what grown-ups call "working.") It got so that whenever he saw me with the laptop, he would come over to make sure I wasn't watching the Chipmunks. So who is tyrannizing whom at Christmas? I had to go to the attic, finally, to watch it.

And it was in the attic that I watched "South Park" Christmas episodes, which, like the Chipmunks on YouTube, are a cynical take on boomer sensibilities, a postmodern revision of Christmas television. They appeal to a generation that has experienced the Big Four mostly through DVD -- an on-demand generation, which never has to wait for anything, the generation that doesn't need Christmas presents because whatever it is you're thinking about getting them, they've already got it.

The "South Park" specials are knowing, ironic, profane, scatological and terrific, something I had heard but never experienced firsthand, because I had always been afraid to watch "South Park" with kids in the house. I found the solution by borrowing my kids' ear buds and plugging them into my laptop, so they couldn't hear dialogue searing enough to burn your hair off.

And now that I was a student of the Christmas canon, the first thing I noticed about the "South Park" animations is how referential they are to their forebears. One episode opens with "South Park" kids performing, yes, a Christmas play, and the Stan character is reciting, yes, the Nativity story, and Kyle is feeling, yes, depressed and alienated. He is alienated because he is Jewish, and his mother has just charged in objecting to the Christmas play, and things get worse when he starts talking to a piece of singing feces called Mr. Hankey and his friends commit him to an insane asylum. It took me awhile to see the appeal of Mr. Hankey, whose message is one of universal fellowship, but who is maybe just too adolescent for a 40-something to see the hilarity of. Still, the satire is brilliant; there is a scene where, in a frenzy of political correctness, "South Park" citizens take issue with the most mundane religious references -- somebody insists the Christmas lights be taken down, as offensive to people with epilepsy -- but nobody objects to a sexualized Christmas song. It's a smart commentary on the things we find offensive and the things we don't but should.

Brilliant, too, is "The Spirit of Christmas," a five-minute short, too profane even for cable, that was made as a video Christmas card and, after being seen by Comedy Central programmers, led to the "South Park" series. After fake credits that make a sly nod to "Krankin Blass," the video (available on YouTube) opens with the kids insulting each other with a savagery that makes the "Peanuts" kids look like a trust therapy group. Then Jesus floats down and tells them he is here for retribution. "He's come to kill you because you're Jewish, Kyle!" one kid says. But it is Santa Claus whom Jesus is after, for besmirching the meaning of Christmas, and when the two meet they have a battle, and the kids cannot decide whom to root for. One kid says, "Jesus, you have to understand that Santa is keeping the spirit of your birthday alive by bringing happiness and joy." And another points out, "Santa, you need to remember that if it weren't for Jesus, this day wouldn't even exist." Watching, I thought: That's a surprisingly good compromise answer to the question of whether the holiday is about commercialism or spiritualism, money or faith, presents or belief, Santa or Jesus. Like the gifts of the Three Wise Men, presents embody the love of one human being for another. In short -- of course -- it's about both.

AND SO I LEARNED SOMETHING, READER, FROM MY LONG HOURS IN FRONT OF THE TELEVISION. I learned that today the holidays are about presents, and not buying presents, about needing money, and learning that money can't buy you love. The holidays are about treasuring your family and feeling you can't stand being around them for another minute. I learned that the way families are portrayed on Christmas television is a reflection of the era: The boomers gave us Rudolph and Donner; the millennials gave us an adult daughter, in "The Christmas Card," so ludicrously bonded to her mother that she breathlessly tells her, "Mom, I kissed Cody!"

In a way, sitting down and watching all these shows was my own flirtation with a George Bailey-like fantasy life. What would Christmas be like if I didn't have all these holiday chores and obligations? What if I didn't have to buy a thousand presents between now and December 24? What if I didn't have to cook Christmas meals and grocery-shop for them first? What if there were nobody depending on me at Christmas? What if I really did have the luxury of being able to sit down and watch television during the holidays? Or even just sit down? This fantasy, or one like it, is not uncommon among mothers. One I know has what she calls the "coma" fantasy, in which she gets lots of sleep in a hospital bed and can't hear the demands of her family and wakes up one day, rested and refreshed. Another has the "hit by a bus" fantasy, in which she steps off a curb and is grazed just enough to break her ankle, so she can spend weeks in bed, chatting on the phone with her girlfriends.

If my life were actually a Christmas movie on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel, this sitting-on-the-couch fantasy would be revealed as unworkable and stale. I would get up from the TV newly aware that lots of free time at the holidays would be empty and meaningless. I would feel ready to crawl back through the clothes dryer into my own world and to start creating that holiday. And it was true: I certainly did feel ready to stop watching, in part because, in this age of demographic fragmentation, watching was getting lonely. I missed my family. Mostly, though, I felt vaguely panicked; the holidays were only weeks away, and nothing had been done. It was time to start planning menus, making lists, buying big presents, buying little presents, addressing envelopes, stringing garlands, hanging wreaths. The one thing I wouldn't be doing between now and Christmas was watching television.

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at mundyl@washpost.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.