I recently came across musings I had shared with you a while back about that parade of Christmas movies that appear each year on television. These days, they start appearing way before Thanksgiving. Personally, it has gotten to the point that the mere recollection of their titles brings along memories from many Christmases past.
My first Visit with you on this topic only dealt with two films, “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I would like to revisit this theme because there is a third movie that belongs in this category: “A Christmas Story.” The entertainment industry has a term for movies like these perennial favorites that people like to watch again and again at Christmas time: “evergreen.”
The “evergreen” holiday movie that goes back the farthest in my memory would have to be “The Wizard of Oz.” It was made in the late 1930s, before I was even born. “The Wizard” was probably at least 15 years old the first time I saw it. Because the television fare in those days was still rather meager, the neighborhood movie house played an important role in giving kids their entertainment fix. We had the McNair Theater at the corner of McNair Avenue and Pestalozzi Street on the near south side of St. Louis. Every Friday evening, the kids in the neighborhood would cram into the McNair for a double feature of mostly cowboy films, comedies and a couple of cartoons thrown in for good measure. The price of admission was 10 cents. With the rest of the quarter from Dad, you could get a bag of popcorn, a soft drink and a Holloway Bar because they each cost a nickel.
The pinnacle of a McNair Theatre experience was their New Year’s Eve Program. It would begin at 7 in the evening and run until midnight, with four or five feature films liberally interspersed with cartoons of “Woody Woodpecker,” “Bugs Bunny,” “Mickey Mouse,” etc.
One New Year’s Eve, in the midst of the usual horse operas and comedies, somebody slipped in “The Wizard of Oz.” I doubt that I was even 10 years old yet. It would be difficult for people growing up in this media-saturated world of today to realize what a deep impression something like that would have on a youngster back then. All that is needed is a picture of Judy Garland in her blue checked pinafore, and I’m back at the McNair with the gang.
I have a different recollection when it comes to “Wonderful Life.” That one had never made it to the backwaters of the McNair in my youth. But thanks to holiday programming on television, I had become very familiar with Bedford Falls by the time I met the man who made the snow for that movie. Apparently, this is the only movie that used this particular type of plastic snow. It looked great but was such a mess to clean up that afterwards they went on to other concoctions. The “snow man” for that movie was a delightful fellow by the name of Simon Bachu. By the time I met Simon, he was a permanent deacon in the St. Louis archdiocese.
Simon was born in Romania and after the Second World War was one of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who came to America in the aftermath of that scourge. He ended up in Los Angeles, got a job on the RKO movie lot and made his own small contribution to “Wonderful Life” with the very realistic, if messy, snow. Simon died in 1999, but to me he was the perfect example of the great benefit the Church has received from the restoration of the permanent diaconate. Deacons bring a rich variety of experience and place this experience and understanding at the service of the ministry of the Church.
The third movie on my list, “A Christmas Story,” was first released in November of 1983, when I was already 40 years old. By that time I had already been a priest for 15 years and my old neighborhood movie house had long ago been closed and torn down. “Wizard of Oz” (at least the part where Dorothy is in Kansas) and “Wonderful Life” both seem to be set in the time period about a decade before I was born. “Christmas Story,” on the other hand, evokes the time, tone and atmosphere of my own childhood recollections of Christmas. I never went on a quest for a Red Rider BB gun. Santa’s surprises were just fine with me. In fact, it probably isn’t the Christmas chronicle that I find evocative as much as the remarkable way this movie recreated the whole atmosphere of living as a young boy in the late ’40s and early ’50s of the 20th century. Their automobile reminds me of our family car. The Herculean effort to get all of the lights on the Christmas tree to burn at one time used to be a universal experience. I can smell the aromas of the St. Louis department stores when Ralphie and his brother are visiting Santa Claus. And their neighborhood could be a street on the near south side of St. Louis 50 years ago.
I recently read somewhere that it wasn’t until 1954 that the U. S. stock markets completely recovered from the crash of 1929. All three of these movies come from that time of economic recovery. Perhaps they can help remind all of us that even in these challenging times, the holy season of Christmas and deep-seated religious and human values can go a long way to fill us with the profound experience of God’s providential care. More than ever, the spirit of Christmas is able to pierce the hardest conditions and renew our faith in God and humanity. As Dorothy proclaims in the closing frames of “Wizard of Oz,” “There’s no place like home.”
