[Originally Buzzed by me 2010-12-07]

I heard a Jean Shepherd radio show recently, from Christmas Day evening, 1965. He was speculating that only handful of people were listing to him at that point, the world feeling tired and greasy and bloated with celebration. He recounted a time he had tuned into a show one Christmas Day evening, only because he was on the road and the weather was bad and wanted the company. The show was out of Chicago and the DJ obviously bored, realizing only a handful of people were listening.

Shepherd was critical of the music of the season, poor European medieval stuff from musicians no one heard of or cared about but made an appearance once a year. He wondered why everyone is compelled to live in a Dickens novel this time of year.

He was even critical of the radio shows that ran ad nauseum every year and weren't very good (I think he was thinking of Lionel Barrymore's A Christmas Carol). He said TV doesn't have anything like that, but he didn't say it would or should, and he didn't realize that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058536/), which had first aired the year before, would do just that, among a handful of others.

Don't know who Jean Shepherd is? He wrote the story that A Christmas Story is based on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/, which has become a perennial classic (in my opinion a very good one), and in recent years has run for 24-hour Christmas Eve/Day marathons on TBS.

I initially thought his feelings about Christmas were oddly opposed his own recollections, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. Christmas to Shepherd wasn't Dickens or European flutes or reruns of old radio shows, it was the sights and sounds and smells of his childhood, which I connect with very viscerally; he's my father's age and captured my father's childhood very accurately; in fact, much of it was distilled into my own Christmases, and I'm sure some into my children's. I haven't read Shepherd's book, but I know the images in the movie well. I grew up around houses like that, saw appliances in some folks homes like those in the movie. The decorations, the incandescent lights on the tree (a real tree), they could have been lifted from millions of children's memories, which is precisely why something becomes a classic.

BTW, look at the movie art for these two pictures, 10 years apart. I can see someone shrugging and saying "Hey, it's been 10 years, who's gonna notice?"

A Christmas Story (1983)





http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/


The Sting (1973)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070735/