William Dean Howells was a writer who lived from 1837 to 1920. He started his career at the Ohio State journal where he wrote poems and short stories. He was also editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881. He became a novelist in 1872, his best-known work being The Rise of Silas Lapham. He was a proponent of artistic Realism, a movement that arose in opposition to Romanticism. As the name implied this was an emphasis on realistic, naturalistic portrayals of people and their lives without extreme artifice or dramatization. This has some obvious political implications in drawing attention to existing societal ills, but it gradually grew calcified in its structures and forms, became closely identified with bourgeois interests, and eventually gave rise to Modernism in opposition. In the works of Howells this realism included railing against what he saw as injustices such as the trials put on in the wake of the Haymarket Riots and the US annexation of the Philippines. He was close friends with such other writers as Henry James and Mark Twain and wrote Abraham Lincoln’s 1960 campaign biography. In 1892 he published a collection of children’s stories called Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children. This included the title story on which this special is based.
The story is fairly short and is presented to us as a father being pestered into telling a story to his young daughter. Half of the fun of the story is the daughter absolutely bullying her father and him using his storytelling to gently tease her back. We get next to no concrete details about either of the characters but from their back-and-forth banter and some flourishes in the writing we get a very good picture of a demanding but adorable daughter and a doting and clever father. Thus we get the story itself and then a story on top of that about what the father is attempting to do by telling his daughter this story in this way.
The daughter insists on being told a Christmas story, and after initially objecting the father agrees. He tells the tale of a little girl who writes a series of letters to the Christmas Fairy wishing that it be Christmas every day. Eventually the fairy agrees that it shall be so for an entire year. The day after Christmas is also Christmas, as is the day after that, and the day after that. The father details how the world is quickly sick of Christmas but must carry on celebrating it anyways. The forests become depopulated in the search of decorative trees, the cost of turkeys and cranberries skyrocket, the economy becomes entirely gift-based causing rampant poverty, and other holidays are trampled in the wake of the all-conquering Christmas. The little girl begs the fairy to reverse the wish to no avail. Eventually she’s found out by everyone else for making the wish and shunned. At last the year ends and the fairy asks if she’s like to make it Christmas every day forever. Having learned her lesson the girl asks that it go back to just once a year and the fairy agrees. The daughter is happy with her story and she and her father go have breakfast. It’s a very charming little tale.
Airing in December 1986 on CBS, this adaptation of the story comes from Thea Flaum and Dick Orkin of Orkin-Flaum Productions. The short-lived company would produce this special and one other, a 1988 adaptation of the Oscar Wilde short story ‘The Canterville Ghost.’ I have to admire their taste in literature, if nothing else. It was co-directed by Monica Kendall and Ed Newmann, both of whom have fairly slim IMDB credits, mostly as animators or producers rather than directors. In addition to the credited writer Marla Frumkin there are also four listed “story consultants,” which is odd considering that the bones of the story remain unchanged and only minor details were adjusted, most of which work fine.
The art direction is interesting. It’s clear they weren’t working with much of a budget and decided to lean into it, to I think mixed results. The backgrounds are fairly crude but deliberately so, looking something like a well-done set of children’s drawings. Everything is slightly askew and exaggerated but not in the usual cartoon way. The characters move as if they were paper doll segments assembled together and the pieces moved separately between frames, which is how I suspect this was animated. If you’re familiar with early Flash animations where the elements are simply shifted around but don’t change in size or warp themselves, you’ll get an idea of what I mean. It's not an unpleasant aesthetic, something like a cartoon version of stop-motion, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. I’m sure there’s a term for this technique in the industry I’m completely unaware of.
The biggest problem I have with the special is that it changes the story from something tossed-off by a mischievous dad to one presented by a father to his children about something that actually happened to their great grandmother Tilly in the late 19th century. Luckily their ancestor lived in the exact same house and had the exact same number of relatives so they could just reuse the models and backgrounds for the flashbacks. I can understand the choice, it keeps it set in the same time period as the original, but nothing about this story needed to happen in 1892. This tale is prompted by the youngest daughter wishing it could be Christmas every day, to which her parents respond in horror. The story is then told explicitly as a cautionary tale, not just as a moral one. This is never taken back, by the way, the Christmas fairy actually appears at the end of the special to do some magic. This strips away that second layer of story I liked so much in the original, the interplay between the tale itself and why it was being told. Here it’s just passing along family lore and a grim warning.
They tweak some of the details, like instead of having to send letters to the Christmas Fairy she just happens to live inside a crystal castle ornament Tilly’s family owns, but for the most part they’re rather unimportant. They add some specifics to the presents, how everyone keeps getting the same clothes and the same dolls day after day, including a multiplying puppy that eventually numbers in the hundreds. The quasi-apocalyptic consequences of the compounding holidays are kept in and are pretty great. We see massive deforestation, bulldozers clearing presents from thoroughfares, carolers croaking out festive cheer against their will, and the best is when Tilly is greeted at her birthday party with a Christmas song instead of Happy Birthday and absolutely loses it.
There are another couple embellished details, like the exact nature of how everyone finds out that Tilly’s wish caused all of this or how she tries to run away from home when she can’t take the societal pressure, but it’s all basically the same story. After society has essentially collapsed worldwide finally the second December 26th hits and the horrific reign of Christmas is over. Everyone is absolutely ecstatic. They crush the presents, create massive bonfires of the decorations, dance joyously in the streets, and the father wraps it up with “And everyone of course forgave Tilly and never mentioned the incident again.” This is a decent enough joke but it doesn’t really make up for the usual “and Christmas magic is real” ending. The little girl finds the crystal castle owned by Tilly, starts to make the same wish, remembers the words her father told her, and wishes instead to be curled up in bed. The fairy appears, floats her to her room, and then wishes the camera a merry Christmas and flies off into the night. I didn’t need any of that.
I’d like to point out that there’s at least one other adaptation in existence, a 1996 television movie made for The Family Channel. It turns the story into a Christmas version of ‘Groundhog Day,’ where an asshole teenage boy makes that same wish and is forced to relive the same Christmas day over and over, which means it misses the entire point of the original. The story is in the public domain so I can’t really think why they even bothered to name it the same thing or even acknowledge the influence since it’s not like they’d get sued for copyright infringement. I did not watch the entire thing but merely scrubbing through it confirmed that it’s exactly as mid-90’s as you’d think such a thing would be. The only reason it didn’t star one of the kids from ‘Home Improvement’ is that they couldn’t have afforded one.
This is a nice little Christmas cartoon that had the courage to be a mostly straight adaptation of a very good Christmas story. The biggest change they made was to set the framing device in modern day, and for once I won’t scold a special for being a story told to children by an adult since that was present in the original version. Its strength lies entirely in its story, which luckily for them was in the public domain and works just as well now as it did when it was first published. The usual availability statements apply and I’d say it’s solidly in the upper half of everything I’ve seen this season.
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