Times are rough the world over. Here in the States, they (MSM, YouTubers, politicians) tell us that times are really bad today. That may be true for certain families, certain folks. I don't see it like they show it, thank God, but then I'm just a dude making less than the national average annually, so I tend to keep a low profile. I try to remain optimistic, and I don't spend a lot. But if you open your ears, you can hear the plight all around you. People all over this great nation of ours are discussing the world falling apart daily.
You know what can help us all? Christmas! Christmas can and will help us get through it, and together. This wonderful holiday brings us together with family and friends and strangers alike and instills in us all that ubiquitously American trait of giving. Through the act of giving we can find joy in sacrifice and altruism, looking out for our neighbors and one another. And a lot of us do not give to get brownie points with the big man in the clouds, nor do we do it for praise. No, we do it because we enjoy the feeling of giving someone something that will make them happy. That's the reason for this holiday to exist today, though for some of us it is still to celebrate the Lord's birth. But generosity is the name of the game. And you don't have to spend money to give. Giving kindness is perhaps the greatest gift we can bestow on one another. Now that's more cheese than I have on the mouse trap beneath my office desk, but you know it's true, once you take off the mask of cynicism we sometimes wear.
Christmas in America is a fascinating and wonderful creation. I use that word, creation, loosely. Christmas in the United States is a very American idea the way that it is celebrated here in the last hundred years or so. We did not create Christmas, and I'm not insinuating that other countries do not celebrate Christmas, of course I'm not, but the way that the holiday has developed here is quite American.
 |
| Still Classic... |
From the poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," to the film "It's a Wonderful Life," Christmas here is a wholly special event. Take Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for example, and what it says about how we embrace should embrace those who are different. Clement Clarke's poem, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, was written at a time when America was in the early stages of national identity (early 19th century) and our holidays were developing into what we have today. Soon the poem was being printed everywhere, spreading its influence and inspiration from coast to coast.
This story is attributed as giving us our version of Santa Clause that we know and love today, with Coca-Cola adopting the look and flavor of the jolly St. Nick. If Clement Clarke's the father of our modern day Americanized Santa Claus, then Coca-Cola would be his mother, for their depiction (painted perfectly by artist Haddon Sundblom) of old Kris Kringle introduced the plump old elf in the red suit with black buckled boots and a friendlier white beard than past old European iterations had. Sundblom's Santa is that jolly rosy-cheeked grandfather-like (or even God-imagined) character that you feel comfortable with, sharing stories and cookies and a cup of whole milk with. Together, these descriptions culminated in giving us the Santa that, instead of delivering presents to children on Christmas day, has the indefatigable St. Nick going home to home all night as reindeer pulled his sleigh across the sky, until every child was visited.
Then there's Normal Rockwell's Christmas in America. It's Haddon Sunblom's Coca-Cola Santa Clause we've come to love set in the cozy, warm and friendly nuclear family in the suburbs of post-War America that Norman rendered our Christmas with which many of us subconsciously think of when we think of the holiday in our heads. These things are responsible for how we celebrate and imagine Christmas today.
Many American films have become Christmas staples in our household, and for us it started with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and then Home Alone, which I feel are the two coziest Xmas movies ever produced. Scrooged shows us that it's never too late to turn it all around and become the man you really are capable of being, and Christmas is usually the catalyst for this change. And Jingle All the Way explores America's consumerism culture, which sort of came about due to parents who worked a bit too much. Elf has become my favorite Christmas flick, which is nearly a four-way tie. It is the most perfect Christmas movie atop Christmas movie legends. Every scene, every song, every setting of Elf just belches Christmas! Buddy the Elf has become as marketable for Christmas as Santa for the 21st century.
Each of these movies portrays a different era for America and American families and Christmas in particular. If Elf is the most optimistic Christmas flick, then Bad Santa would have to be its opposite, it's negative, pessimistic other. It shows an America society during Christmas through the lens of the downtrodden, the thief, the drunk. There is not much in Bad Santa that spells out hope that we used to have here that's in short supply since the Pandemic, or just before. The crazy thing is that Bad Santa is before things got really bad in the States. It came out in 2003, the same year as Elf. These two films are at the far end of the spectrum. One has a protagonist that is purely innocent and full of joy; the other, a Santa-groupie-humping curmudgeonly anti-hero that is prescient in his outlook on American society in general that would be at home here in 2025. Willie T Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) would probably be a Flat Earth YouTube or Tik Tok prepper/influencer today, calling out the imminent demise of our culture...and the world in general.
I look at Home Alone and Elf and lament that Hollywood could never, ever reproduce Christmas classics like these legends today. Not today, not with what our society has become. But today we are in just another era of our shared American experience. And we will make it through this, as well. We are not in the end times... I believe that Nostalgia is the key culture setting through which we celebrate the holiday today. All over I see folks and families celebrating much the same way we always have, with our own traditions, with many built on how we Gen X celebrated as kids.
Source: Link
Comments
Post a Comment