“Christmas begins earlier every year!”

By A Theodore Kachel
This is the cry we all hear around Halloween celebrations in October when retail stores begin their roll-out of Christmas themed decorations and gift suggestions. This is a fact of life in the shopping centers in America.
This struck me full force when I read Ashley Spencer’s report in the New York Times on October 30th this year. “How Many Christmas Movies is Too Many Christmas Movies?” In it she reviews with alarm how the three Hallmark channels has produced forty new Christmas themed movies to show during this holiday season beginning on October 25th and continuing well into January 2020. In addition, she notes that Netflix and Lifetime are producing their own bounty of these “formulaic cozy romances.” Not to be out done Hollywood remembering its success with Home Alone in 1990 will add it more costly fare for the cinemas to show beginning in November with the release of Last Christmas, whose preview and title suggest we may be in for a ‘weepy classic’ tale of a hero/heroine fatal disease makes this their ‘last Christmas.”
I do not share her alarm at this trend. Why?
Back in 1984 as scholar-in-residence at the American Theatre Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I published in the December issue of American Theatre, a defense of the many resident theatres’ adaptions of Dicken’s Christmas Carol for both fun and profit during the holiday season. This annual production was for many theatres the major way they finished their year in the black rather than in the deep red. Yet it was a controversial programming decision within the resident theatre community. Some saw this as a ‘sell-out’ of artistic standards for commercial success. On the contrary, when you learn about how Dicken’s story help restore Christmas as a public holiday then, it is an appropriate play for joining in the holiday celebration now. The same can be said about the deeper significance of these “Christmas Movies” even given their commercial success for cable television. How So?
“Christmas in Conway” is one of these movies you’ll find repeated every year since its debut as a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation on ABC in 2013 with Andy Garcia and Mary Louis Parker. It is a feel-good ‘weepie.’ It did not play well on ABC with low ratings, but it lasts because of what is known in Hollywood as “a big-idea’ premise. Parker plays a wife with a fatal disease. Garcia her ‘gruff’ working-class husband in construction. They live their lives in small town Conway, South Carolina where she returns home from the hospital to die. Since he proposed to her while they were riding on a Ferris Wheel, he decides to build one in their back yard so she and he can have one last ride together. This ‘big idea’ does not sit well with the community, but he does it anyway, and they get their last ride together just before she dies.
Dealing with death is not a small matter in anyone’s story to show in a movie. It is a staple of drama going all the way back to the beginning for us in the West to the Greek tragedies. Whatever your sense of the worth of this film it found a way to show us an imaginative solution for this particular circumstance of dying that this family faced. With grit and work they found a way to affirm life while not running away from facing the inevitability of loss. That is one ‘hallmark’ of the Hallmark movies year-round but with particular enthusiasm at the holiday season.
The other more frequent holiday myth these Christmas movies express is one of hope, renewal, new families, sometimes blended after loss, sometimes brand-new with ‘cute premise’ romance entanglements, but almost always ending with ‘the kiss.’ True this is cozy, and formulaic, but not necessarily false. So, why do we fear this? These feelings, these sentiments that could fall over into sentimentality is the secular ‘original sin’ since we escaped Victorian times.
At this season of each year, light falls, darkness comes, the day grows short. It is ritual time. Ritual informs the deeper story structure that underlis these formulaic works — whether laughable or weepie — comedy or tragedy-or even their bastard baby, the melodrama. All movies with their musical scores embrace melodrama to keep us emotionally cued about what we should feel with every flickering frame.
Victor Turner, the anthropologist, gives us the idea we need for understanding these ritual occasions — liminality. Rituals are the means for moving us to that ‘in-between’ place where we can sense that there is more to being alive as humans than we experience in ‘ordinary times.’
The original stories that impel the Christmas holiday is about a birth of a baby to a family on a journey having troubles. They have been pushed from their home by a political power that needs to count them for tax purposes. They manage to work this out with a little help from their friends in an unlikely place for birthing a baby, a barn. All is well that ends well in this initial story. Nevertheless, as Paul Tillich, the theologian, noted ‘truly this was a baby born in a grave’ for we know the end of this boy’s story. He is to be killed horribly by that same political power at the end of his life. Death never seems to far away from even Christmas celebrations. What does this have to do with Christmas movies? Where is the comedy, the romance, in this family?
It is because this story was not lost. We are still telling it several thousand years later. Even if we do not tell it always well in our ‘rom-com’ movies, its spirit of more than just survival comes through in the resurrecting moves of our romances — that death does not have the final say, the last chord, the falling song, no, being alive, going on, these are the ‘final stories’ we show and sing to each other in Christmas movies. That we make the effort to make new stories around our new experiences of these liminal realties makes romance and comedy, the entanglements in quantum dizzy ways again and again. Rituals give us something to do when we need to do something in the throes of passion, at the edge of life and of language by enacting our willingness to begin again. That is the form of Christmas that lives on in the Christmas Movies — generosity rather than scarcity is our pledge. Share the surplus!
Moreover, what we really have is an Xmas celebration!
This is no plea to put ‘the Christ back into Christmas.’ No, just the opposite. What we need to recognize has happened to our holiday season. It is open to everyone, believers or not, Scrooges and Tiny Tims. Share the surplus!
Remember how the Northwest Native American communities did the Potlach Ceremonies. In a festive celebration they would pool all their surplus food and other goods to share and then burn the excess in a great celebration fire — like Burning Man today. The gratiful cry was — “Share the Surplus.” So too that is what is recommended by the Christmas Movies in their storytelling way. X-Mass is a recognition of this expansive spirit to open Christmas in our times to all. To share the surplus.
Yes, wish everybody a ‘Merry Christmas’ or a ‘Happy Hanukah’ or ‘Celebrate Kwanza’ or just say with joy — ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town!’ Be as secular or sacred or whatever mixture your family, friends, and colleagues represent in your life. It’s okay; this is a holiday — a time to do things beyond the ordinary to show and to say how significant others are in your life — what they present to you in work, in play, in the thanks you can give for having life at all. That is what these Christmas movies do; they present lives moving toward hope, toward a shared future in families, toward parades that give joy to the children, to the trees with lights glowing against the darkness of winter promising a sunny spring. Share the surplus!
Like all festive time it helps us escape from clock time, the darker ‘lean times’ to temporarily take you back to ‘home,’ into the time of sharing your surplus, money, time and/or imagination, with others — the ‘haves’ with the ‘have-nots’ when the human community remembers and hopes that ‘fat times’ will come again. It is a courageous activity of gift-giving, extravagant feasting, ecstatic singing and dancing, and movie-sharing. In the face of the harshness in society and in nature. It wastes resources, the surplus, in order to demonstrate to rich and to poor alike that the human spirit is audacious in its hope even in the teeth of contrary evidence all about it. Then the courage to be, to overcome for a while the anxiety of having and holding possessions in a culture where that is our main form of security becomes possible. Then too, the obviousness of loss and of death will not be allowed to overcome the less obvious truth that generosity in the human community more times than not has paid off in the survival of our species. Share the surplus!
Remember Christmas Carol was and is a carol — all can sing when they are captured by the Spirit of this Holiday — this recovery of the wholeness — holiness — wherever and with whomever you find it now. It is this carol that each Christmas movie tries to capture again for us — the busy Scrooges of today. So, watch a Hallmark Christmas movie this season; slow down, spend time with a Tiny Tim, or the Maid who becomes a Queen, or a dying wife riding a Ferris Wheel, and say with them all — “God Bless Us, Everyone!”
Waste some time with a Christmas movie? Not at all!
Share the Surplus!
