A Family Circus Christmas (1979)

              We now continue with another of what’s going to be a pretty solid run of cartoon adaptations of existing properties.  By 1979 ‘The Family Circus’ had been published for nineteen years, just under a third of its current sixty-two-year existence.  Like a lot of long-running comics it was pretty different when it started from what it would eventually become.  There were only three kids in the beginning, the baby PJ would be introduced in 1962.  The dad was fatter, had a bigger nose, and didn’t wear glasses.  The jokes were a little bluer and involved things like the adults drinking a bit too much or maybe the dad having an eye for the ladies.  The very central idea though, how utterly tiring it could be to parent multiple children, was still present.  By the mid-60’s, to go along with a name change from the original ‘The Family Circle’ (the magazine of the same name objected), the strip started turning in a much more family-friendly direction, losing the booze and skirt-chasing elements and downplaying any real pathos or unhappiness.  The father came more and more to physically resemble its artist and writer Bill Keane and the cartoon became more overtly autobiographical.  All of the characters were, to varying degrees, based on members of the creator’s own family, their household and neighborhood more closely resembled what he’d experienced in his own childhood, and eventually the dad of the family was established to be a cartoonist implied to be drawing the comic itself.   By 1979 the transition was fully complete and the ‘The Family Circus’ of this special is very recognizable as the same cartoon it is today.

It's Jeffy's world, we're just living in it.  For now.

              This is despite the fact that, since Bill Keane’s death in 2011, the comic has been written and drawn by Bill Keane’s son Jeff, on whom the character of Jeffy is rather unsurprisingly based.  Creative inertia is a powerful thing when there’s that much money involved.  Obviously nobody could have known that this would happen in 1979, but it is interesting that despite being by far the least interesting character, and yes I’m including PJ, this special focuses on Jeffy and his apparently adorable shenanigans to a frustrating extent.  The parents barely get any screen time, which is understandable I suppose, and PJ can’t talk so I guess I can’t complain about how little he has to do, but Billy and especially Dolly get shoved off to the side so we can watch Jeffy hilariously misunderstand everything his family tells him about Christmas.  Billy at least gets to act as something of a foil to Jeffy, Dolly is basically guest starring in this thing.  She’s given the thinnest of characterizations and is usually busy with something else whenever the camera happens to find her.  I guess I can pretend that she’s got her own deal going on and just can’t be bothered to appear in the special.

              To be popular for over half a century any piece of art, even a comic panel your eyes mostly just pass over on your way to the actually funny stuff, has to have at least some amount of central worth to it, and there’s a great deal of recognizable truth mixed in with the pablum in ‘The Family Circus.’  About half of the special is made up of gentle, good-natured observational humor about what it’s like to raise a bunch of young kids during the holidays.  There are plenty of instances where the parents are obviously feeling overwhelmed but try to manage their children as best they can.  The kids want to decorate the tree early, the mom says no, they instantly counter with bringing the decoration boxes upstairs and bargain the mom down to saying yes.  The second the dad steps in the front door he’s bombarded with questions about presents and snowmen.  He tells them it’s time for bed, they beg to hear a Christmas bedtime story then interrupt him constantly when he starts to read.  This is a fairly solid foundation for funny pages material, good enough to be clipped out and hung up on Grandma’s fridge, and it translates reasonably well to the tv screen.

              The half that’s not leftover ‘Full House’ pitches is what I can’t really give a pass to, because that’s when it turns into the Jeffy show.  ‘The Family Circus’ has always been all about its little recurring gimmicks, like the dotted line that follows people around or the invisible troublemakers Not Me, Ida Know, and company.  The kind of joke that’s funny exactly once but continues to be told over and over again.  The recurring gimmick here is Jeffy’s habit of taking everything everyone tells him literally, instantly believing things to such an extent that he will have visual hallucinations at the merest suggestion.  Upon being told that he better not be naughty because Santa’s watching him he conjures up a spectral Santa glaring at him in stern judgement.  When Mom pretends to call Santa to tattle on her misbehaving offspring he looks out of the window to witness Santa atop a telephone pole on the other end of the call.  He sees him so clearly that he’ll drag members of his family along to see him as well and when they can’t he gets genuinely anguished.  When Billy or Dolly tell him he’s lying he insists that he’s not, stamping his feet and getting angry even after the other people have left.  This is not a child telling lies for attention, this child believes with all of his heart.

              This is generally annoying but it does translate into one dream sequence that I’m forced to admit is actually pretty good.  The lead up and payoff is pretty well done.  As part of the overall shenanigans of the day Billy points out that dad’s excuse that they can’t build a snowman because the snow is too dry contradicts what he said yesterday about the snow being too wet, Jeffy justifies giving a candy cane a sneaky lick because it’s dusty, and before decorating the tree they have to turn its bald spot towards the wall.  All of this comes to an end by an actual plot starting to emerge when it’s discovered that the traditional star for the top of the tree is missing, much to the dad’s chagrin.  It was his own father’s and was pretty important to him.  As Mom is tucking the kids into bed she explains that Dad’s a bit down about the star because he misses his own dad, who’s in heaven.  Jeffy wonders if he’ll be visiting for Christmas, at which point Billy bluntly states he can’t because he’s dead.  I can’t lie, I kind of love Billy in this special, his general put-upon air of being over his family’s shit is adorable.

              After being reassured by Billy that Santa can do anything, mostly to shut the kid up, Jeffy drifts off to sleep and dreams about flying along with Santa.  He’s taken to presumably the North Pole, where he sees the fields of candy canes being hastily harvested so, as Santa says, they can avoid the dust storms.  They continue on to see elves on ladders carefully cutting bald spots into Christmas trees so families will know which side to turn to the wall.  The tour ends at an open-air kitchen carefully making snowman snow that’s not too wet and not too dry.  This is all pretty good stuff, exactly how kid brains work.

              Then the entire thing kind of flies off of the adorability rails when Jeffy asks Santa to bring Grandad down from heaven for Christmas and, this being Jeffy’s dream, Santa agrees.  Jeffy wakes up the next morning and insists that the dream really happened, no matter how much Billy tries to explain that it didn’t.  When told that Santa will for sure bring Grandad down from heaven Billy, who no matter how awesome he is is still only seven years old, can only insist that it’s impossible.  Jeffy is not having it.

              The run-up to Christmas continues, including a visit to the mall to see Santa and the kids very publicly doing good things to stay off the naughty list.  Finally, it’s Christmas Eve.  Dolly decides to drop a dime on Jeffy and tell Mom about his Grandad visit request to Santa.  I doubt that introducing the concept of mortality to a three-year-old was how she wanted to spend the night before Christmas but Mom soldiers on.  As she tucks Jeffy into bed she shows him a picture of Grandad and explains that since he’s in heaven not even Santa can bring him for a visit.  Jeffy instantly focuses on how Billy tattled on him, but Mom instantly corrects him to say it was Dolly, which is not the last time I will question the parenting skills of the Keanes on this night.

              After she leaves Jeffy starts to drift off but spots Santa.  Jeffy excitedly asks if he brought Grandad, and Santa gestures towards the living room.  Jeffy hurries over and there is spectral Grandad.  Jeffy’s all smug about being right and shows off the tree to his dead relative, then admits that they’ve misplaced the star.  He asks Grandad if he knows where it is.  Grandad nods and leads Jeffy to the hall closet.  Spotting a box on the top shelf Jeffy arranges some very rickety objects and climbs up to reach it.  This wakes up Dad who rushes out and manages to catch him when he falls, box in hand.  The lid flies off to reveal the missing star.  Instead of being mad that his kid almost killed himself Dad is just happy he found his heirloom decoration.  I question this man’s parenting priorities.  When Jeffy tells him that his dead grandfather showed him where it was Dad says he believes him.  They put the star on the tree and the special ends with everyone happy in the morning, reflecting on what a great Christmas it was

              Now.  I know what’s actually going on here.  There’s a not-so-subtle Christianity underlying ‘The Family Circus,’ they’re not exactly coy about it.  The game they’re playing is winking and nodding at the audience, telling us that sure, all of these dead relatives wandering around and seen by the kids are just their imaginations, but since heaven is definitely for real and they’re up there who can say, maybe it’s not?  That way they can have little gentle messages about how when your loved ones are gone they’re just waiting for you up in heaven, you’ll see them again for sure, it’s great for kids to believe all that stuff, isn’t it?  The nicest of religious propaganda.  It’s just going for the easy feel-good angle.

              I refuse to believe that’s what’s going on here, motherfucking Jeffy saw an actual for-real goddamn ghost. 

              One of two things is going on here and I’m not sure which is more disturbing.  The first is that these specters are real.  All of those Santas constantly judging Jeffy?  Really there, either an astral projection of the actual Santa or perhaps his true form.  It would explain how he can watch everyone and be everywhere.  Dead Grandad?  Genuine ghost, finally able to contact someone in his family, finally getting his star back on its proper place at the top of the tree.  Jeffy will grow up surrounded by ever-present phantoms, tearfully insisting on their reality to everyone’s mounting disbelief until finally, out of sheer societal disapproval, he’ll stop talking about them, either insisting to himself that they’re not real, crippling his mental well being for decades to come out with this enforced delusion, or growing resentful at the disbelieving world who won’t listen to his truth and spiraling down into resentment that’s likely to take a disturbing turn towards violence.  If he has such obvious proof of the existence of life after death, who better than he to decide whether some of those around him might be better off on the other side?

              The other possibility might be even worse: that these specters weren’t previously real but through his will alone Jeffy made them real.  He is the Lathe of Heaven, and when told that Santa is watching him he thus made it so.  The dream he insisted to Billy actually happened, as real as anything in this world can be when one such as Jeffy exists.  Perhaps the family, distracted by Christmas, was unaware of the panicked news from the outside world of flying reindeer and candy cane farms sprouting worldwide.  That dead Grandad was a manifestation of Jeffy’s consciousness, for now docile and helpful, locating the Christmas star because to young Jeffy that was all he could think of to want, but who’s to say that over the years, as both he and his desires mature, “Grandad” won’t start offering other, more nefarious services.  Perhaps the Keane household has been held in statis these sixty-two years by an eternal three-year-old who dislikes change and thus keeps time itself from his family’s door.

              The special first aired on December 18, 1979.  It was issued at various times on home VHS but never on DVD and doesn’t seem to be available for streaming, although it exists on Prime Video, albeit listed as perpetually unavailable.  It’s on all of the usual places such as YouTube and The Internet Archive.  1978 saw a Family Circus Valentine’s Day special and an Easter special followed in 1982.  There’s been talk about a movie adaptation since 2010 but it seems doubtful one will ever emerge.  This is a completely inoffensive cartoon and is solidly in ‘The Family Circus’ wheelhouse, so if you’re a fan of the gentlest possible comedy and find your heart easy to warm it’s well-done enough to be worth a watch.