In Medias Res: The Five Best Christmas Television Episodes Ever

Thursday, December 08, 2011

The Five Best Christmas Television Episodes Ever

Well, no, obviously they're aren't "objectively" the best; I'm not going to pretend to be able to make that kind of claim. So let's amend that purposefully provocative post title to simply read "Some Favorite Christmas Television Episodes of Mine." Note, though, that this is a serious list, unlike the one I shared three years ago. No special one-off television extravaganzas, no network holiday broadcasts, and nothing fake: just plain old actual, regular "Christmas episodes" from series that I watched and loved (or at least liked enough to keep watching). In chronological order:

Happy Days, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," broadcast December 17, 1974. I was never a particularly big Happy Days fan; it just wasn't one of those shows that had much impact on me. And the Happy Days which I did follow came later in the 1970s, in the era of Mork from Ork, Chachi selling his soul to the devil, and, yes, Fonzie jumping a shark (I actually remember watching that episode in its original broadcast). But I caught this classic episode in reruns, and it's stayed with me for years. Ignore the hideous laugh track (which the series ditched the following season) and just enjoy the sentiment. The whole thing is on YouTube; watch it here, here, and here.

M*A*S*H, "Death Takes a Holiday," broadcast December 15, 1980. M*A*S*H, on the other hand, really was a big influence on my life, or at least as much as any television show might be. This episode was from the ninth season, and by this time things were slowing down (I don't think the show ever recovered from the departure of Radar, myself). You can see the heavy-handedness in the dialogue, and in particular in the overwrought conflict between Hunnicutt and Father Mulcahy, and the speechifying by Houlihan, all over their rival claims to a dying soldier's life. But the personal journies through Christmas memories and charity exhibited by Winchester and Klinger ring true. Watch it here.

SCTV, "Christmas (with Catherine O'Hara and Andrae Crouch)," broadcast December 17, 1982. I didn't catch SCTV when it was originally broadcast; for me, it was a program shown occasionally on a local PBS station, around 11pm, before they would switch over to Monty Python's Flying Circus. But they did their best to show episodes in order, as seasonally appropriate, and this one, which I suppose I watched sometime in December 1986, put me on the floor I was laughing so hard. I really couldn't say why; I suppose it was just the over-the-top, idiotic banality of it all. Unfortunately I can't find the whole episode itself online, and the clips available from it on YouTube don't include the best bit: Johnny LaRue's desperate quest to find Santa Claus and beg for a new camera crane, so he can get the only thing he's ever wanted: a "crane shot." But Count Floyd's "Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas" is pretty awesome in its weird, relentless, lunatic way too.

Magnum, P.I., "Operation: Silent Night," broadcast December 15, 1983. I adored Magnum, P.I., though I would be very hard-pressed to remember more than a couple of specific plots. But I'm probably in the same boat there with every other white male American boy in the early to mid 1980s: we watched the show because it had Hawaiian seascapes, fast cars, guns, scantily-clad women, fistfights, emotional drama, tons of running gags, and not-infrequent-fourth-wall-breaking by Tom Selleck, his eyebrows, and his mustache. With all that, who needs to remember plots? But still, I do remember this one. It has the whole Magnum mixture: somber references to WWII, an annoying-yet-ultimately-decent-hearted military authority figure, a dream sequence, plus T.C. as the hysterical voice of reason, Rick as comic relief, Higgins as a source of both wisdom and windbaggery, and Thomas Magnum himself as the generous everyman trying to survive through it all. Watch it here.

Community, "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," broadcast December 9, 2010. Twenty-seven years in between this Christmas episode and the last one; why is that? The lack of quality holiday programming? No--I just stopped watching lots of network television by the time I was getting into my late teens and then went off to college and then later graduate school, and throughout those years and ever since my focus on one program or another has been pretty intermittent. (And those shows which I did watch regularly rarely had Christmas episodes at all, or at least not memorable ones; I'm just not coming up with anything holiday-related and worth mentioning from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Homicide.) So why Community? It's excellent television, but I confess I'm not a faithful watcher; basically, I just catch episodes here and there when my friends all pester me to check them out online. Anyway, I did so last year for this episode, and I can't thank my friends enough. The remote-controlled Christmas pterodactyl is only the start; by the end, you've had a perfectly snarky, multicultural, pop-culture-reference-drenched laugh-fest, with an unexpectedly honest and even slightly touching moment from Pierce along the way. Watch the whole thing here.

Okay, so those are some favorites of mine. Any recommendations, readers?

2 comments:

bmj said...: The M*A*S*H* episode is good one.

My personal favorite is the X-Files "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas."; Thursday, December 08, 2011
Chris said...: I always loved MASH's "Christmas in Korea" episode best.; Thursday, December 08, 2011

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Thursday, December 08, 2011

The Five Best Christmas Television Episodes Ever

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