Chestnuts

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire/Jack Frost nipping at your nose.”  The dulcet tones of Mel Torme, the “Velvet Fog,” come wafting over the airwaves, heralding the arrival of another holiday season. But wait, what holiday is it? The calendar reads November 1. It is still three weeks until Thanksgiving, and this is Christmas music. Ah, yes, I have forgotten. For the past three years this local station has been broadcasting Christmas music 24/7 beginning November 1. Two full months of Christmas music, 16% of their yearly program devoted to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and friends. Seems a bit excessive, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy hearing Nat “King” Cole”  doing “This Christmas Song” once a year, and Chris Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” is always enjoyable, but eight weeks before the holiday? I don’t know.

Christmas movies don’t play this way with the calendar, do they? I mean we must wait until December, sometimes even until Christmas Day itself, to see holiday offerings like Quentin Tarrantino’s “The Hateful Eight (bounty hunting, hangings, betrayal, and deception),” “Krampus” (a demonic force is unleashed to punish those who do not believe in the holiday), and “Concussion” (football-related brain trauma). If those stories don’t get us in the holiday mood, what will? OK, so they aren’t exactly “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” They will still give us all something to do on Christmas Day when every retail outlet is closed, and you know those blockbusters are guaranteed to deliver chills and spills. Besides, do you want to be the only one who can’t deliver an opinion about them after New Year’s?

The only real problem I see with holiday entertainment is that movie about football concussions. It’s possible that it may cast a pall over America’s favorite holiday pastime. How can we enjoy seeing a 300-pound lineman sack the quarterback, or cheer as a 250-pound linebacker launches himself like a human missile at a skinny wide receiver if we are worried about the damage that might be done to the players’ brains? If we really had to stop and consider the toll that human football takes on participants not only would it detract from our enjoyment of the game but we would have nothing to do while the turkey finished cooking in the oven. Garrison Keillor tells a story about one holiday when his family decided to turn off the football games and have some honest to goodness conversation. It wasn’t twenty minutes before family members were grabbing their coats and heading for the door, exclaiming, “Well, I never!” and “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I …” and the host was thinking “Go, and never darken my towels again!” No, better leave the football on the TV, and don’t even say the word concussion.

Not only will football provide solace for the holidays, but the venerable, holiday classics will grace the flat screens across our land as well. No need to partake of cinematic entertainment at the multiplex when TV will give us the tried and true holiday films: “Miracle on 34th Street” with a juvenile Natalie Wood and a mature Maureen O’Hara, “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart and Lionel Barrymore, and “A Christmas Carol” (1951 version) with the great Alastair Sim as Scrooge and Kathleen Harrison as the housekeeper Mrs. Dilber. We can choose to be cynical, scoff at the feel-good endings, and show that we know life to be more complex and less optimistic, but these movies are classics for good reasons. They are solid cinematic achievements – well-acted, expertly directed and photographed; they tell stories that resonate, especially at holiday time; and they do not avoid life’s sadness, even as they celebrate the triumph of good over evil.

“A Christmas Carol” (also known as “Scrooge”) is a case in point. Charles Dickens’s story is rife with avarice, mendacity, and most of the other deadly sins so obvious in Victorian England. Not only has Scrooge and his partner Jacob Marley reveled in their heartless exploitation in order to succeed in business, but those who felt the sting of Scrooge’s scorn were ever ready to pounce on his corpse as soon as it grew cold. In a memorable scene presented to him by the Ghost of Christmas Future, Scrooge beholds his laundress, his housekeeper and the undertaker bringing loot they plundered to Joe the rag merchant. He listens as his laundress pronounces judgement they all shared about the old skinflint: “If he wanted to keep them after he was dead, wicked old screw, why wasn’t he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he’d have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.” Scrooge watches as his housekeeper, Mrs. Dilber, proves herself to have been the most skillful scavenger, presenting Joe with Scrooge’s plush bed curtains. Joe: “You don’t mean to say you took them down, rings and all, with him lying there?” Mrs. Dilber: “I certainly shan’t hold my hand when I can I can get anything in it by reaching it out for the sake of such a man as he was.” Then she presents a final package. Joe: “His blankets?” Mrs. Dilber:”Whose else’s do you think? He isn’t likely to take cold without them.” When the viewer is provided such a detailed affecting picture of greed, Scrooge’s ultimate transformation can’t help but be truly redemptive.

One last note: If you can catch Maureen O’Hara or Kathleen Harrison on the screen this holiday season, you can enjoy once more the talents of two outstanding actresses with impressive bodies of work. O’Hara left us this past October at the age of 95. Harrison lived to be 103 before passing in 1995.