The holidays are a special time — that is to say, a time for specials. All over the television, the seasonal signifiers, the holly and the mistletoe, trees and lights, snowflakes and fake furs are dragged out of storage and gaily appended to sitcoms, serials, talk shows, game shows and come-but-once-a-year simulacrums of this or that person’s old-fashioned, down-home-in-the-holler, up-on-the-mountain Christmas.
Thus has it been since time immemorial, relatively speaking.
“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future,” T.S. Eliot poetically speculated, “and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present,” you are possibly watching YouTube, where many of the Christmas specials, skits, cartoons, parodies and songs that ever were, live in perpetuity or until someone’s lawyer has them taken down. What follow are visions of Christmases past found on YouTube to make your days in front of an Internet-connected screen merry and bright, along with descriptive copy metaphorically to guide your sleigh. Rise, and walk with me.
1. And as Scrooge was borne backward through the Yules, so do we arrive at Dec. 22, 1963, and the Christmas episode of the single-season “The Judy Garland Show,” a pretend Christmas party on a Hollywood living room soundstage set. Soon-to-be-replaced staff arranger and writer of special material Mel Torme, who duets with Garland on his own (roasting) chestnut “The Christmas Song,” has written that she taped the show on little sleep after heavy drinking; whatever, she comes across, excepting a couple of small flubs, as in control of her gifts, a great American artist and public raw nerve. As ever, she seems perpetually modern, out of time, for all time. The appearances by her younger children, Lorna and Jack Luft, require a bit of indulgence, though they’re standard for “at home with” holiday specials; but daughter Liza Minnelli, 17, is already coming into her own.
2. “Santa’s afraid to come to Vietnam,” says Bob Hope in the January 1968 special crafted from his 1967 USO tour of Southeast Asia. “Last year he only got as far as the first ‘Ho’ and he was picked up by the MPs.” Whatever you think about the geopolitical circumstances of its creation or, indeed, of Hope as a stand-up comedian, it’s a fascinating document, if not quite a documentary, shot on film and closer to cinema verite than anything similar you’d see on TV now. There are jokes about the anti-war movement back home, but mostly they go to the miseries of military life in a war zone. Raquel Welch frugs energetically in a knit minidress and delivers a game reading of Linda Ronstadt’s “Different Drum.” For historical comparison, look for the 1944 Hope USO radio broadcast, from “somewhere in the South Pacific.”
3. Were there ever any friendlier words spoken in English than “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”? The one-man Mt. Rushmore of country music made four Christmas specials for CBS in the late 1970s that mixed holiday favorites, gospel tunes, novelty numbers, skits, and hits from Cash’s august back catalog. Of the four, the most straightforward and musically satisfying is the second, from Nashville in 1977, which has an autobiographical through-line that puts him in Army fatigues and reunites him with old Sun Records labelmates Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.
4. Missing from Johnny Cash’s 1977 Sun reunion is Elvis Presley, who had died only months before. A decade earlier he had made his own holiday program (broadcast on NBC on Dec. 3, 1968), now commonly called the “comeback” special. Presley’s manager, the self-styled Col. Tom Parker, had wanted a straightforward collection of holiday favorites, but director Steve Binder managed to get something else, equally apt for the season and legendary since: a real rebirth, taking Presley back to the beginning and dragging him forward into the present. Clad all in black leather, shaking off the dust and breaking through the crust of his Hollywoodification, the King sounds great and never looked better.
5. The Muppets have often had their way with seasonal material, but “A Muppet Family Christmas” from 1987 has the distinction of bringing all the branches together, with the “Muppet Show” Muppets, the “Sesame Street” Muppets, the “Fraggle Rock” Muppets and even the Muppet Babies all descending upon Fozzie Bear’s mother’s house. It is a distinction of perhaps little import to some, but this is the real Muppet deal, the classic lineup, with Jim Henson still alive, Frank Oz still (often literally) at his side, and Jason Segel only in second grade.
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