As I was trawling through the TV channels in search of something interesting to watch last week, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a repeat of the venerable Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which first aired in 1964.
For many children of my vintage (I was coming up on one year old when the show first aired), Rudolph was one of the pillars of the holiday season, along with A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), and Frosty the Snowman (1969). (I know that 1970’s Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town! Is beloved by many, but it was never a mainstay for me like the others were.)
Seeing Rudolph on TV took me back to those days when if you missed seeing a special like that during its one annual airing on network TV, you had to wait another 365 days to see it. Now I can watch the entire show on my phone, such is the wonderful world of technology we live in, but I just know it wouldn’t be the same. On a TV, though, with ads every few minutes, it seemed perfectly right, and I envied any kids seeing it for the first time.
Another Christmas blast from my past is NORAD Tracks Santa, which I am happy to say is still going strong after nearly 60 years. Its origins, way back in 1955, are cloudy, with details of how it actually came about changing over the years; suffice it to say that a misdialled phone call from a child wanting to talk to Santa made it through to the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) centre in Colorado Springs instead.
From that tiny seed grew the story that CONAD was tracking Santa and his sleigh on their journey around the world on Christmas Eve. CONAD was succeeded by the North America Air Defense Command (NORAD) in 1958, and the tradition continued, growing more elaborate each year.
I grew up in Richmond, and my parents’ radio station of choice was CKNW. I still remember the thrill of hearing the newscasts, on Dec. 24, start to include bulletins about NORAD spotting and tracking a mysterious entity — led by what appeared to be a reindeer with a bright red nose — flying over the Earth. He was real! Santa was really real! The grown-ups on the news said it, so it must be true!
Simpler days, of course, but NORAD Tracks Santa is still going strong, with a website where you can watch an animation that tracks Santa in real time. Perhaps I’m showing my age, but it simply can’t compare to hearing those tiny snippets on the radio from the oh-so-serious newsreaders, and letting my imagination do the rest.
Christmas is a time to tell and re-tell old stories and legends and (perhaps) catch a glimpse of ineffable mystery, or beauty, or joy. Thomas Hardy — a great novelist who was, I think, an even greater poet — captures this in his lovely poem “The Oxen”, wherein he tells of the old country legend that at midnight on Christmas Eve, the barnyard animals kneel down in honour of the Christ child who was born in their stable long ago.
In the poem, an elder notes that it is Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock, and says “Now they are all on their knees.” The others picture the “meek, mild” creatures where they “dwelt in their strawy pen,” and Hardy — who was an atheist — writes “Nor did it occur to one of us there / To doubt they were kneeling then.”
No one would concoct “so fair a fancy” these days, he says, but the poem concludes that if someone said “Come, see the oxen kneel” he would go with them, “hoping it might be so.” Aye, there’s the wonder and magic of Christmas: hope. However you celebrate Christmas (if you do), I hope you can — amidst the bustle of the season — find at least one moment of wonder.
