Charlie Brown's Christmas

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Mike_from_NJ said:
There was an animated special called “Christmas Every Day” or something like that
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It’s on You Tube.
It’s completely insane and hilarious. I wish it had caught on like some of the other specials.
 
Here’s an obscure one from the seventies—The House Without a Christmas Tree.
It was set in the 40s, and he premise was a girl living with her father and grandmother (her mother was dead), and for various reasons, the father refuses to get a Christmas tree, and the daughter schemes to get one.

It’s a very low-key production, sweet without being saccharine, no toe-tapping songs or dance numbers.

It was a TV special first, then was novelized by Gail Rock, (who did a much better job than novelizations usually are).
She went on to write a few other novels about the characters which were all good reads.

It’s also on You Tube
 
I remember that program vaguely. I feel my parents would watch it, but I didn’t like it because it wasn’t a cartoon.
 
I remember the other two holiday specials with “Addie”, one was for Easter where she and her friends all designed their own dresses for a fashion show and took acting lessons from a failed alcoholic actress, and another for Valentine’s Day where she has a crush on her teacher.

I didn’t like “House Without a Christmas Tree” because the dad frankly seemed abusive. I can’t imagine someone so wrapped up in his own grief for years that he refuses to get his own child a tree. He was much nicer in the later two specials.
 
One of the books was A Thanksgiving Treasure where Addie befriends a mean old man so she can ride and take care of his horse, but then they genuinely become friends.
Sadly, there were no mean old men with horses in my neighborhood, so I couldn’t do what she did :confused:

I don’t know if that was ever a movie.
 
My daughter and I have a tradition of watching White Christmas, Christmas in Connecticut, and Singing in the Rain (not a Christmas movie but traditions don’t have to make sense, right?) in one sitting at Christmas time.
My favorite is Charlie Brown, though. I cry during Linus’ monologue every single time.
 
We are fortunate enough to have the children’s book, J.T. by Jane Wagner.

It was made into a TV movie, but it’s never shown. I think it’s just too sad. Both of my daughters cried when they read the book, and I can’t read it without getting teary-eyed.

It’s the story of J.T., an African American boy who lives with his mother in the ghetto. He is on the edge of “going bad…stealin’ and lyin’” His mother is in despair.

Then J.T. finds an old, one-eyed, badly-hurt alley cat, and his sensitivity and responsibility emerges as he lavishes love and care on the poor cat. He makes a castle for it in an old oven in a junkyard, and tells the grocery store owner to add “tuna fish” to his mom’s credit list. He also spends a lot of time making a beautiful eye patch for the cat.

It doesn’t turn out well, but his mother and the store owner learn that J.T. isn’t “goin’ bad” at all, but is capable of doing much good. it’s the beginning of a turn-around for J.T.

SOOOO good. And it all takes place around Christmas, which is why it was originally shown during the Christmas season when I was a child.

I wish they would put it back on TV. I think it’'s somewhere on the Internet. Well worth watching, but get the kleenex out. I think a lot of poor kids are still living in the kind of world that J.T. lived in.
 
I saw that when I was a kid, and while it has a “happy ending” of sorts, it also features a classic example of the Dog Dies at the End trope, which was very prevalent in TV and children’s literature when I was a kid, to the point where I did not want to read or watch any TV movie or book with an animal as a major plot point or special friend because it was highly likely to die at the end. The only exceptions were shows like Lassie or Gentle Ben where the series required that Lassie or Ben be alive to star in the next episode or season, so you knew Lassie or Ben was going to survive. I was really into animals and animal shows and animal books as a child (I wanted to be a veterinarian at that point) and had great difficulty with animal deaths on TV and in literature. When I watched that show, I really didn’t care much about what kind of world JT lived in or anything about him other than the cat, which as you said did not end well and I knew on some level it wouldn’t. Just like “The Yearling”, “Old Yeller”, “A Girl Named Sooner”, “It’s Like This, Cat”, “A Day No Pigs Would DIe”, and probably others I’m either forgetting or chose not to read after skipping to the end to see if the animal died.

I suspect the program is not shown any more because it became politically incorrect to show people of color living in the kind of dire straits shown in programs from that time.
 
There was a good TV movie about 25 years ago, starring Lloyd Bridges and Shirley Jones, called Silent Night, Lonely Night. He was staying in this New England hotel, because his wife was institutionalized somewhere near. An affair almost started, both of them being at loose ends over Christmas, but then he was called to go and see his wife, so nothing happened. Mainly a personality study and good acting. Hoped they’d repeat it someday.
 
I remember that. I think it was based on some play and I used it as a source for a big high school term paper on “Themes of Loneliness in American Literature”. I didn’t pick that topic. We pulled topics out of a hat at random and I got that totally angsty topic. By the way the movie is actually almost 50 years old, not 25 🙂
 
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Some people think any movie with Christmas in it is a Christmas movie.

Perhaps that is why The Godfather runs for almost 24 hours…
 
Okay, just to lighten the mood, Miss Piggy being awesome:


(If this isn’t an emergency dance break, I don’t know what is…)
 
I enjoy watching A Child’s Christmas in Wales an adaption from the author Dylan Marlais Thomas

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