The City that Forgot about Christmas (1974)

               The first time through this special was incredibly disorientating.  As the minutes passed my confusion kept mounting as nothing made sense and scenes followed one after the other with little no no logical sense connecting anything.  I took pages of notes frantically trying to keep up and by the end the madness threatened to engulf me.

              Then I calmed down, watched it a second time, and figured out that everything clicks into place once you realize that this isn’t actually a Christmas special at all but a thinly-veiled argument for the inevitability of theocratic rule.

              I should explain.  This is another piece of religious propaganda put out by the Lutheran Church of America starring Benji and Waldo.  Before I started down this road I really did not understand the amount of effort Lutherans put into their cultural outreach.  For some reason this one is far more available than ‘Christmas Is,’ a fairly high-quality copy is in the Internet Archive.  It’s an adaptation of the 1968 book of the same name by Mary P. Warren, which explains why Benji and Waldo only make token appearances in the wraparound sections.  This is a story told to them and a random friend in order to teach them the true meaning of Christmas.  Again.  Benji seems a few years older than we last saw him so I guess he managed to forget it.  The second wise man would be so disappointed.

              Let’s get the setup out of the way.  Benji and Waldo are driven out of the house by his aggressively fed-up parents, one of which is distractingly voiced by Casey Kasem.  They both seem super-stressed about the Christmas preparations, snapping at every little thing and upset about everything they have to do to get ready for the holidays, which is both very over the top and genuinely relatable.  They order Benji and Waldo out of the house where they meet up with a friend who’s also resentful about what the holiday is doing to everyone.  They decide to go hang out with Benji’s grandfather in the garage.  He asks them what they’re so upset about and after they vent he decides to tell them a story about the titular city.

              In a way it’s my own fault for being confused during the next twenty minutes because the grandfather gives it away in the first few moments of the story as he gravely intones about the town, “… because they had forgotten the meaning of Christmas they’d also forgotten the meaning of love.”  At this point the camera transitions to a vaguely medieval town filled with bickering, hateful assholes.  The grandfather goes on to describe how, while the rest of the world is enjoying God’s love and Christmas, everyone that lived there was cruel and selfish.  Some kids play tricks on a blind beggar, husbands and wives yell and sneer at each other, people fight in the street, it’s all pretty bad.

              Now.  I’m aware that this is both a story being told at short notice by a grandfather to Benji and a parable being told by the special to the audience so I really shouldn’t get hung up too much on this but the first thing that threw me into furious confusion is the utter infeasibility of this city’s existence.  It would be one thing if the town had decided to do away with Christmas, or if this was set in a time or a place where Christianity hadn’t made its way to yet, but the narrative establishes that this is a city that had once known Christmas but managed to have it expunged from their collective memory somehow.  As the special goes on to show they have also forgotten about angels and apparently religion in general.  The town isn’t shown to be large enough to be self-sufficient, the mayor is wearing sophisticated-enough clothes that some trade must be taking place, but whatever commerce is happening it’s done in such a way that no cultural contamination takes place.  When a stranger does show up the populace is startled and wary but not confused, this is something rare but not unknown to them.  Visually everything is shorthand for ‘typical medieval city,’ somewhere Mickey Mouse can run around and pretend to be a giant killer in, and trade was rampant back then.  They are both in the world and somehow kept apart.

              The citizens of the town are shown to be cruel and selfish, especially the mayor and his flunkies, but only up to a point.  Everyone is mad all the time, they say mean things and refuse to help each other out, but this is a cartoon for children, so they don’t take this anywhere near it’s logical conclusion.  No violence, no sex, none of the interesting sins.  Simple acts of kindness throw them into confusion, not being actively hostile skeeves them out.  We also see a blind beggar asking for donations and reacting in disappointment when a kid slips a rock into his cup, something you’d figure he’d be used to by now and which completely contradicts everything else shown about the town, so nobody involved in this show thought about anything for more than a few moments.  The show makes a deliberate point that all of this cruelty is a direct result of the city forgetting about Christmas.  One does not come from the other in any way that I can follow.  This didn’t make any sense the first time through and it was only on the second viewing that I realized that the title of the special is a lie.

              One day a stranger by the name of Matthew comes to town, accompanied by his dog Gabriel.  It’s important to note that he specifically comes to the town to teach it about Christmas, he doesn’t just wander in.  He’s grilled by the mayor, who doesn’t like strangers, and he happily tells them he’s a carpenter (of course) and that he’s only staying in town until Christmas, at which point the mayor (played by Charles Nelson Reilly at his snidely best) asks if that’s a disease, a non-sequitur so severe I almost fell out of my chair when I heard it.  Matthew settles down and amazes the town by such acts as helping people get their carts out of the mud, helping old ladies cross the road, or by fixing someone’s step, which implies the town has also forgotten about the concept of a service economy. 

              It all finally kicks off one day when he’s out hauling logs to take to his workshop, an activity the townspeople look at with awe and confusion, when he stops, takes out a flute, and trills a few notes.  A random child pops out from behind a tree (because apparently this is how people spend their time in this inexplicably insular city) and is intrigued by the sight.  It’s unclear if she doesn’t know what a flute is, what music is, or if she’s just shy.  Matthew tells her to try it herself and after a bit of encouragement and a magical flash of light that never does get explained she’s suddenly playing a full melody.  This causes more kids to pop out from behind more trees and soon Matthew is leading them all in a song about how Christmas is coming and nothing can stop it and then they all walk in a procession through town to his workshop where he starts indoctrinating them into the wonders of Christmas.

              I need to stress how creepy both the song and the imagery is here.  The repeated refrain of the song is “you can’t stop Christmas, there really is no way.”  It should be noted that the children don’t know what Christmas is at this point, Matthew hasn’t taught them, they’re just marching glassy-eyed down the street and repeating words.  The girl never does stop playing the flute, for all I know that flash took away her free will and she kept playing it until she passed out and it dropped from her limp fingers.

              The kids ask about the angel statues sitting around the workshop and wonder why he’s so nice.  He tells them it’s because he remembers Christmas, which again makes no sense as a logical statement, there’s some leap in though here.  Soon the mayor bursts in demanding to know what’s going on.  The kids fill him in on the bits of Christmas lore they’ve been fed so far.  He’s having none of it and he says he’ll put a stop to it.  Matthew tuts offhandedly that even a mayor can’t stop Christmas, and this proves true as the months pass and the kids bring their parents into the workshop to hear about this Christmas thing.  Everyone is entirely receptive and soon they have a productive little cult going on.

Eventually the entire town is looking forward to the big nativity scene they’re going to erect in the town square.  Everyone is on board except for the mayor and his gang, who have a plan.  The night before Christmas they sneak into the workshop and steal the wooden Baby Jeebs.  Matthew watches this from the shadows and then sneaks out of town, remarking to himself the now they’ll see if they understand the meaning of the baby.  This shift from Christmas to baby is pretty clunky and just adds to the ending coming out of nowhere.

              The next morning the town is shocked to find both Matthew and the Baby Jeebs gone.  They resolve to hold the Nativity scene anyways in the hope that Matthew will come back.  I have watched the following scenes several times and I still don’t quite understand how one of the kids suddenly makes the leap to understanding that Christmas isn’t about the literal wooden Baby Jeebs but the Baby Jeebs in all our hearts.  They get a real baby to stand in for the Nativity scene and the story portion of the special closes by the kid saying that Matthew could leave because now Jesus had come to their city and no one could take him away from them again.  Everyone in the city is nice now because of Jesus.  Somehow it took an entire second watch for me to understand that this was never about the Christmas holiday, that was just shorthand for Christianity as a whole.  Everything makes very simple sense if you just retitle it ‘The City that Forgot about Jesus.’

              The argument of this special is that people are mean, angry, and selfish unless they love Jesus.  In and of itself this is a fairly standard Christian argument, that at base people are sinners and it’s only through God’s love that they can learn to love others.  The parts where it touts the inevitability of the triumph of Christianity over all of society is standard as well, I guess, although I’m not used to seeing it portrayed as blatantly as it is here.  I’m a little creeped out by the idea that Matthew starts with the kids and then ropes in the parents, if that was in there as a deliberate tactic to ensnare those with less developed critical thinking tools I’m not sure it’s a positive spin on things. 

              In the end my problems with this special might stem from the fact that in the minds of its writers and producers the holiday of Christmas and Christianity itself are interchangeable.  Their argument would go, I would assume, that one leads inevitably to the other and therefore to describe one is to describe them both.  To me the holiday, with its pagan origins and secular history, is a thing unto itself, and so to argue that the cessation of the observance of a holiday leads to a breakdown in civil society is a bit of a stretch.  This is a Christmas special in a technical sense, it’s a story told at Christmas about a guy who talks about it a whole bunch and it ends with a Nativity scene, but really it’s a thin cover thrown over about as blatant a proselytizing effort as I’ve seen.  The militancy of the Lutheran message has ramped up sharply over the three specials of theirs that I’ve seen and frankly I’m a little worried about the kinds of things they might be producing today.