I so badly want to make my own Christmas traditions. I want to have a place, a space of my own (our own, really) where I can be myself and do the things I want and like. Every year I say to myself “maybe next year…”, and every year I’m disappointed because I’m never there.
At the top of the list of things I want to do when we have a place of our own is to make traditions. One Christmas tradition I desperately want each year is to watch all of my favorite childhood Christmas movies in the days leading up to Christmas. I don’t want to watch them alone, either. I want to force The Destroyer to watch them with me, only I know he’d hate it. I would want to watch all of my Rankin/Bass favorites like The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. I’d watch How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the cartoon version of course), A Charlie Brown Christmas, and A Muppet Family Christmas.
This last movie more than any other is my very, very favorite. As a child of the 80′s, there was nothing more fantastical to me than seeing my favorite Muppet characters hanging out with the Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street gangs. IN A SNOW STORM. I wanted this movie so badly, but each year we were never fast enough with the VCR to catch it in time. As the years went by, I stopped seeing it played on TV altogether. It’s hard to find, but some day I’ll own it. I’ve promised myself.
Another movie I want to own (like all of them on the list, duh) is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of this movie for years! I’d seen it probably two or three times at a very young age, and my parents never knew what I was talking about when I sang the song about making a cat with big green eyes, or told them I wanted to watch the movie with the Great Ak in the fairy wood when Santa was just a little baby. I swear, they thought I was nuts, making things up. But I knew I wasn’t! I knew it was real, because there was no way my tiny little mind could make up something that fabulous, that magical. Finally, after about 15 years of searching on and off, I found out the name of the movie I was looking for. I told my mom it WAS real, and at this point it had been so long since I’d bugged her about it (I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty grown up by this point) she had no idea what I was talking about. But I remembered. And now I had the name of the movie. But have I seen it on sale at ANY store in ANY section at Christmas time? Never. I look for it the same way I look for the Muppet Family Christmas every year in every store I go to. It’s like there’s some conspiracy to keep the classics at bay.
Of course to these Christmas classics I would add some of my other Christmas favorites: Elf, Home Alone, Love Actually, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and Rocky IV.
Two weeks ago my niece and nephew spent the night, and they watched The Christmas Toy with me. I was so excited to have someone to watch it with, because when I’d asked The Destroyer some days earlier if he would watch it with me he said he probably never would. And who wants to watch The Christmas Toy alone??? Because of The Christmas Toy I’ve been convinced since I was a little girl that my toys play with each other when I’m not looking, but not in the creepy kind of way you’re probably imagining. All of my toys had personalities, and I would lay in bed at night giddy with the notion that once I fell asleep my Cabbage Patch doll Trudy would be playing with the Fisher Price people and my big sister’s Barbie dolls, and Stuffy would watch over me while I slept, never leaving my side like the great protector I knew he was. Christmas movies are some of the most magical, inspiring memories I have hoarded away in the recesses of my brain. I pull these memories out each year when I fail to make this Christmas tradition a reality and I marvel in the feeling of innocent magic that envelops me once again.
So I’ll say it once more, because Christmas is almost upon us and we still don’t have a place of our own and I’ve only watched one of my favorite Christmas movies. Maybe next year…
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