“Davey and Goliath” was a show that premiered in 1961 following the success of “Gumby” by fellow creator Art Clokey. Starring a Claymation boy named Davey and his talking (but only to him) pet dog Goliath, it was produced by the United Lutheran Church in America in an effort to provide moral guidance to the nation’s children. It told short, simple morality tales over the course of 39 fifteen-minute episodes between 1961 and 1964. Although religious in nature it was never explicitly Lutheran in its message, aside from some musical and visual cues. In December 1965 the first half-hour episode aired, a Christmas special more overtly religious than previous episodes but still relatively non-denominational.
The premise of the entire special is that Davey isn’t feeling the Christmas spirit and keeps trying to find it in various unsuccessful ways. Decorating, buying presents, putting together a nativity play, none of these efforts get him to feel the way he thinks he’s supposed to be feeling. There’s a key moment where he hopes that opening his Christmas presents will have him feeling the “right Christmas feelings.” We’ll circle back around to that. His sister has no such trouble and is constantly berating him to keep trying while Goliath is more sympathetic but also insists he should keep at it. Through continued effort and an eventual spontaneous good deed for a newly made friend he comes to understand the true meaning of Christmas.
There’s a very easy way to twist the narrative of this special into something sinister. With basically no effort at all this can all be reframed as someone raised in a fundamentalist or even cult-like environment starting to question beliefs he’s been fed since essentially birth and being pressured by the community around him to abandon those doubts and fall in line, eventually convincing himself into succumbing. At no point is it an option to simply abandon the effort to acquire this nebulous ‘Christmas spirit,’ instead this struggle is always presented as something that everyone around him finds not only perplexing as a concept but agrees is a personal failing of Davey himself. His eventual personal revelation is exactly in line with what everyone has been pressuring him to believe and he is explicitly welcomed back into the fold through his public affirmation of the collective’s beliefs.
The behaviors he engages in to acquire this Christmas spirit are those deemed ‘correct’ by his community: buying presents, decorating his living space, collaborating with his peers to reenact an historical event deemed central to their agreed narrative, all activities that emphasis fitting in and conforming to the expectations of those around him. None of these things seem to bring him any real pleasure or spring from a spontaneous desire from within but are those deemed necessary by the group. He reflects after each one and finds no solace, only an inner hollowness that continues to gnaw away at him, driving him further into despair until at his lowest point he is curled weeping upon his bed.
There’s also the behavior of his little sister Sally, which is intended to be reassuring to the audience but often comes across as vaguely menacing. Her devotion to the creche in the family living room starts as charming but increasingly comes across as slavish and slightly unhinged as the special progresses. It begins innocently enough, with her first actions in the special announcing she’s going to set it up, with Davey voicing his skepticism of its necessity before leaving the room. Upon his return she’s almost finished it and after learning he’s still not ‘feeling’ Christmas she insists he look ever closer and closer at the creche, claiming that merely looking upon it will solve his internal struggle. In a later scene she sings by herself to the creche and when Davey starts talking to her she pointedly ignores him until she’s done, not even acknowledging he’s in the room. At the end of the special, after Davey’s learned his eventual lesson and he runs to that same creche to say he now understands and loves Christmas, suddenly his sister and all the other characters are on the other side of the living room window, watching him, and make him say it again, louder, to reaffirm he’s one of them again.
Like I said, super easy, including having Goliath, which only Davey can hear talk, being the externalization of this conformist mindset so Davey can have someone to argue with safely without fearing repercussions from humans, all of that. But honestly to frame it as this over is dismissive when I think something more complicated is going on.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a sincere effort at delivering a non-garbage morality tale to children. Although he is chided about not feeling The Christmas Spirit and encouraged to keep trying he’s never in trouble for it or socially ostracized, it is seen as a problem but one he’s encouraged to keep finding an answer for himself. And although I don’t entirely follow the moral logic of the ending it’s not that bad of a message. At the beginning of the special we are introduced to a new kid in town manning the Christmas tree lot, put there by a never-seen father. He and Davey grow increasingly friendly over the course of the special and although he would like to join in with the kid’s nativity play his obligations at the lot keep him from doing so. On his way to finally perform the play Davey decides to let the new kid take his place and mans the lot in his stead. I have a lot to say about an absent father forcing his child to run a tree lot by himself and the likelihood of anyone buying a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve (which someone does, two in fact, since Davey hard sells the guy), but that’s a different set of complaints. Essentially the message boils down to being nice to others like God was nice to us with Jesus, which in a Christian context is fair enough.
It wasn’t until the second watch that a creeping sense of unease began to grow. The special opens with Davey basically looking directly into the camera and saying, “I hate Christmas.” In most Christmas specials this is the starting point of the villain, here it’s the main character, the one us kids are supposed to identify with. And keep in mind this is explicitly a television show made by adults to teach moral lessons to children, so we need to ask what the intentions of the makers were by doing this. The ostensible lesson taught by the end is fine enough, the true meaning of Christmas is kindness to others, but did they have to lean in so very hard on the existential dread gnawing at Davey’s heart? I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here; he’s continually show to be miserable, at one point he literally runs from decorating a Christmas tree to collapse on his bed in tears.
If we’re meant to identify with Davey, then the function of the special must be to teach a lesson to children who are old enough to start needing more from their religion than just ‘because we say so.’ Presents works for a while to justify all the pageantry, then you can use the story of the Baby Jeebs for a few more years, but eventually kids start to grow up and need some actual substantial reason why they get dragged to church once a week. As shown in the special Davey is the only person with any kind of internal life, all the other children are shown as unquestioning and rather robotic. Especially Sally, she does genuinely come off as slightly sinister. The only one questioning anything is Davey, and honestly that can be pretty relatable. A lot of kids feel like they’re the only ones who think they don’t feel like they’re supposed to feel and that everyone around them is just fine, regardless of the reality.
My unease grows from the fact that the people in charge of this special think they have the answers to those kinds of questions. The ones they provide in this special, be kind to others and it’s the thought that counts, are about as good as one can come up with in a 29 minute Claymation special, but I’m struck by the confidence behind their ability to slowly manipulate lumps of clay over and over again while taking thousands upon thousands of incremental pictures with the explicit intention of using this process to tell children how to live the rest of their lives. Advice is one thing, certainty based upon an eschatological understanding of the workings of the universe is another. I have the sinking feeling that now that I’ve identified this unease I’m going to keep feeling it over and over again this season.
If nothing else this special is over five decades old so as a cultural artifact it’s fascinating. A lot of the societal aspects are obviously dated, though not in a way that’s at all hateful. Congrats to United Lutheran Church in America for prominently having some black kids in there. I completely forgot about the existence of five-and-dime stores and the existence of loudspeaker-festooned trucks just wandering the streets announcing things. If you’re against the Western monotheistic worldview in any fundamental way you’re going to be against this pretty much entirely but taken for what it is it’s a pretty well done Christmas special. I’m not surprised it hasn’t become a timeless classic but I would consider it to be something that holds up fairly well after such a long time. Just wish I could shake this creeping worry.
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