O Irony, O Irony, How Puny Are They Branches

I am not a [insert name of grumpy, fictitious Christmas-hating character here: Scrooge, Grinch, Mouse-with-glasses-from-that-odd-cartoon-with-the-big-clock-and-crappy-animation].  You can't be yourself and hate Christmas these days, you have to be "a" someone.  Although oddly, no one ever says "I'm not a Herod," even though he was undoubtedly the biggest Christmas-hater ever.

Anyway, I'm not.  It gets under my skin that Christmas is rolled out earlier every year, but everyone says that and it still gets earlier.  The Christmas season is an actual season long now, and soon it will start the day after Christmas like in Whoville.  It's tiring.  It makes Christmas wear out it's welcome.  It's too much of a good thing.

And I'm not one who overanalyzes things that aren't really meant to be looked at so closely, except when I am, which is probably a lot.  Like, say, watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and finding fault with the shape of Hermie's dental tools when I already have accepted that a flying lion cares enough about imperfect toys (now known as "seconds") to purchase, develop, and maintain an island for them where they can be miserable without being watched.  It's stupid of me, and I do it.

This isn't like that.  I love A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Fifty years after it was written, I still laugh that Lucy never gets what she truly wants - real estate. It's endearing that the kids who did the voices had been purposely taught English slightly incorrectly and wooden.  As in, "What do you want?  For Christmas Charlie Brown?"  It's cute.  It became a hallmark of Charlie Brown animated shows.  If you want your kids to be a Charlie Brown voice-over actor, you need to start early - begin erasing any correct diction they know before age three or you'll be way behind.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is pretty blunt when hitting you over the head with its meaning: Christmas of the 1960s was too commercial.  The Grinch also bluntly says this, but Charlie Brown actually says this, in dialogue, more than once.

And what does Charlie Brown (everyone always uses his full name, no one ever calls him simply "Charlie") do to fight the consumerism all around him?  Yeah, he buys a pathetic little real Christmas tree and everyone else hates it.  In the end, everyone else gives it a little love and "spruces" it up (oh YES!  Is it possible no one else has ever made that joke?  I know.  It's not possible). 



It's absolutely clear in its message - Christmas is too commercial and the little pathetic tree is Charlie Brown's attempt to overcome greed and the "buy buy buy" mentality.  That was fifty years ago, and we've taken the message to heart.

So - and I'm not the brightest so I can't be the only one to notice this, someone must have writen about it already - the irony that the little anti-consumerism symbol Christmas tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas is now available as a fake tree for purchase from retailers for as much as $23.99 is so pungent that the Sphinx can smell it.  And I mean that in the sense that the Sphinx is made of stone and can not smell anything at all, not because it doesn't have a nose, but I can see how you could have misinterpreted that.

Here it is.

Charlie Brown literally walks through and rejects a lot full of fake trees before choosing the little tree.  He goes out of his way to avoid commercialism and phoniness.  And today you can be a consumer and purchase a phony copy of the tree!  For Christmas. 

This tree represents the television special that represents the opposite of everything the tree represents.  It has become its own anti-matter and annihilated itself so now neither the fake tree nor the Christmas special ever existed, and therefore neither does this blog you didn't just read, and therefore writing anything further is pointless, except to mention that my first reaction to the fake tree was that I kinda wanted one.

(c) 2010 Scott Teel.  All rights reserved.