Jesus and Santa Live Here

If there’s one mortal personality most closely associated with Christmas, it's Ebenezer Scrooge, a man I am growing to more closely identify with each passing Christmas.[1]


My favorite Scrooges, all for sentimental reasons:

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol
My earliest memory is Mister Magoo. This was has Jim Backus voicing Scrooge. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123179/ ➚


That was so early, the images are little more than a few dark frames as though seen through a Viewmaster, but it's precisely that distance and dimness that lends so much charm, charm that would quickly disappear were I to watch it again as an adult, and so even though that opportunity's been available, I've chosen not to.

I'm very fond of Jim Backus for other reasons, of course. He was Thurston Howell, III on Gilligan's Island, which I've promised to blog about in earnest as a collection of pop culture allegories on human nature.

Albert Finney in Scrooge
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066344/ ➚
I watched this with my father and little brother Tom late into the night when first broadcast, all the lights off, me and Tom lying on thick orange shag carpet in front of our large console Zenith TV. Scrooge was released in 1970, so it probably appeared on TV in 1971, making me, uhhhh, very little.

Mom would kill me if she knew I was telling you this (she doesn't come here as far as I know), but that carpet is still there, and it's as soft under your feet as month-old Kentucky blue grass, and it looks like new.

George C Scott in A Christmas Carol
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087056/ ➚
This was 1984. I was a senior in college. I was alone, all my roommates had gone home for Christmas. I had finals up until the afternoon of the last day of finals week and my ride for Pennsylvania was leaving the morning after that; I was among the last to leave campus that year, I think.

(IMDb says the release date was Dec 17, 1984; that would likely have fallen near the end of Calvin College's final exam schedule.)

So I watched this new version alone, and enjoyed it all the more for that; the combination of youth, loneliness, and Christmas made an indelible mark in the holiday portion of my mind forever.[2]

That week I also watched an hour-long Facts of Life Christmas special (you know that show, with Blair and Tootie and Mrs Garrett, etc).

(IMDb says the Christmas episode I would have watched was "Christmas in the Big House" and aired Dec. 19, 1984. I know for certain I was still on campus and alone, but it would have been late, and I suspect final exams were over.)

I felt especially lonely that year, not because I should have been, but because people close to me had all left, and I was not yet home; yet there was a still, peaceful alignment with something, and it stays with me still.

[1]
Grammar be damned. That's how people talk. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with "split infinitive" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a ballpoint pen through his heart.

[2]
Experiences like this are recorded in a thin layer above our reptilian brains, just above autonomic responses, where sex and hunger and cold shivers lie.

As Dorothy says, it's not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It's far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain.

It's where Jesus and Santa live; it's where I write, where my Dad went when he died, and where I go when I am sad, or at peace, like now, on Christmas morning, the house still asleep but for me. You can feel things there. I can feel my daughter in my arms, and people that I've hugged and are no more, and people that I never hugged but wanted to, and review every taste and scent and flicker of every Christmas I've ever lived.

I'm not lumping all these things together, real and imagined, as deserving equal merit or consideration or time, but this layer defies inspection, like the ocean surface, which is not a thing, but a boundary, a demarcation that is constantly undulating, rolling, lapping, renewing, recreating.

And it is were I keep Christmas, and keep it well, if such a thing is possible for any of us.

Merry Christmas.