The Christmas Tape (Patreon)

It’s no secret that I love me some nostalgic introspection. The only thing better than reminiscing over The Way Things Used To Be™ is to accompany it with a sigh of lament over how Kids These Days will never understand what it was like back in OUR day. And that goes TRIPLE for a topic as nostalgia-fueled and memory laden as Christmas. We’re up to our novelty-sweater-clad NECKS in holiday traditions and recollections of yesterday this time of year. Is there any better setting for ascribing an inflated sense of importance to random fragments of pop cultural ephemera which no one outside our age group can identify with? If so, I don’t wanna know about it! And today, that’s just what I’m gonna do. Let’s talk about the unique phenomenon that was The Christmas Tape.

The setting is any Christmas in the early-80s to late-90s. You’re a more-or-less well off, vaguely middle class adult with a shiny new VCR and a shiny new child to keep occupied. Some local TV station is airing a marathon of holiday programing, and the kid is fully engrossed by the colorful cartoons and catchy music. Suddenly, you remember that you’ve got this magic box that lets you save TV shows to re-watch whenever you want! So you pop in a tape, mash “record,” and just like that, whatever random specials happened to be airing on that random channel that day just became THE core canon of holiday entertainment for your kid. This is the tape you’re gonna be digging out every December when it’s really time to make things properly Christmasy. These are the specials that the kid is going to revisit to recapture that warm, fuzzy memory of childhood, regardless of their actual quality.

See, that’s the thing about The Christmas Tape. There’s probably a few obvious classics in the mix, your Grinches and Rudolphs and Charlie Browns, but there’s inevitably going to be a lot of OTHER stuff the station just threw on the air to fill time. The “Other” holiday specials that never clicked with audiences and fell out of circulation after just a few years. The Holiday-themed sequels and spin-offs to some other property that nobody cares about anymore. The token Christmas episode of a show that otherwise hasn’t aired in years. THAT kind of stuff, just sitting on a shelf in the station vaults and, well, as long as they still had the broadcast rights, might as well run it. To anyone else, it’s completely forgettable, but because YOU’VE got it on YOUR Christmas Tape, it’s every bit as essential to the holiday spirit as the officially designated classics. And THEN there’s the added personal charm of odd quirks specific to your individual recording. Maybe your local channel made some unique Christmas-y bumpers to play between shows, or had an on-screen personality or local celebrity film some hosting segments. Maybe your family was a bit sloppy with the Pause button, and either caught some local commercials or accidentally cut off part of the show. Maybe your Christmas Tape has versions of specials edited for syndication, so they’re not the same as what you’d get on the Official Remastered BluRay. The point is, I knew plenty of other people whose family had a Christmas Tape just like mine did, but at the same time NOBODY had a Christmas Tape quite like my family did.

Yes, I know this isn’t exclusively a Christmas thing, the entire VHS Era lent itself to this kind of personalized, preserved oddities. Any kind of pop culture is more memorable to you personally if it's the ones you had extra chances to burn it into your own memory. It’s just that the whole ritual aspect of the Holiday Season, the act of digging something out at JUST this one time of year, infuses that specific ephemera with far more nostalgic power than some random tape of the Disney Afternoon that you could re-watch any old time. And yes, I realize that the concept of individually recorded media didn’t vanish when tape fell out of disuse. Every generation has their own “Only __s Kids Will Understand,” and this is just happens to be one of mine. But hey, it’s my blog, and I can talk about what I want, so nya-nya. Now let’s talk about some random off-air recording of Christmas specials that I’m waaaay to emotionally attached to!

First off, even though I was the one who brought it up, I must confess that vintage commercials/TV spots element wasn’t as big a factor in our family’s Christmas Tape as it was for others. I knew a lot of people who just let the tape roll straight through whatever show they were recording, commercials and all (If you watched the Star Wars Holiday Special bootleg this Christmas, you know how distinctive those commercial breaks can be), but MY family was really good at mashing that pause button. So while I get just as nostalgic about that one M&Ms commercial or that Hersey’s Kisses one or what have you, they never became a part of the Christmas Tape experience the way they did for other people I know (Now, ask me about when we recorded Star Wars off of The SciFi Channel sometime and find out which dialog by Grand Moff Tarkin I'll forever associate with an ice tea commercial). I DO have plenty of experience with the other two Christmas Tape oddities: recording mishaps and editing for syndication, and they’re both handily demonstrated by the same special.

Our recording of A Chipmunk Christmas was one of the few times on our Christmas tape where we slipped up with the buttons. I’m not sure why, but for whatever reason we missed the first minute or so of the special, only starting up with The Chipmunks getting Dave out of bed. That’s a significant minute or so, though, since that’s where the whole “little sick boy” plot is introduced. Without that opening teaser, the entire “Alvin’s magic harmonica cures cancer” storylines seems to come even more out of nowhere than it already does. And speaking of coming out of nowhere, there’s Alvin’s bad dream. In the original broadcast version, the one now available on home video, Dave chewing Alvin out for wanting to buy a gift “for himself” leads to a fitful sleep where Alvin has a VERY trippy and nonsensical dream. It’s basically just an excuse for Chuck Jones to work the Clyde Crashcup character from the old Alvin Show into a special where he otherwise doesn’t belong… and he doesn’t belong anyway. The whole thing is classic Big Lipped Alligator Moment material: a drawn out skit that doesn’t fit the tone of the special, contributes nothing to the plot, is never referenced again, and could be removed entirely without hurting anything. And I KNOW you could remove it, because my version DID, and I never noticed! The syndicated version we taped cuts from Alvin rolling around while his inner monologue torments him straight to Dave coming upstairs and misunderstanding Alvin shouting “Money!” in his sleep. There’s a visible edit where the transitions are stitched together, so you can tell something happened if you look for it, but for years I had no reason too. It’s such a natural flow of events that young me never even considered that there might be a whole scene there I was missing, and I was SEVERELY weirded out when I finally saw the whole thing.  Even now, I get vague Mandela Effect vibes from watching this scene that's not "supposed" to be there.

And, of course, there’s plenty of other odd variations to established specials just like these. Look up all the variations of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer that have aired over the years, they straight up replaced whole songs for some editions. That’s gotta be VERY disorienting to keep up with. But the truly fun stuff isn’t the imperfect versions of familiar media we had sitting on our shelves. No, we need to get to the Christmas specials that you and probably ONLY you hold in equal esteem with the world-renowned classics simply because you had them on the same tape. The stuff that everybody else passes by as it rots in the $1 discount bins if it even got a home release at all, but you still revere thanks to it’s place in your holiday tradition. Up above, I presented three rough categories of Christmas Tape stand-outs: the attempt at a new special that never caught on with the public, the holiday sequel to something ELSE that we all forgot about, and the random Christmas episode of a show that otherwise wasn’t on anymore. To try and give this egg nog-fueled ramble SOME kind of structure, I’ll cover one example of each from our Christmas Tape.

And RIGHT off the bat, I’m screwing with that format, because my “forgotten one-off special” example wasn’t actually a one-off at all. I mean, it was when it first hit TVs in 1983, but The Christmas Tree Train was actually a pilot for a whole series of specials and shows called Chucklewood Critters, or “Buttons & Rusty” after it’s two leads. A sort of off-brand Yogi Bear idea (it was created by a pair of ex-Hanna-Barbera animators), the titular Buttons the Bear and Rusty the Fox lived in Chucklewood Park and got into your standard cute little animal hijinks with their parents and Ranger Jonsey… or at least that’s what I’m TOLD happens in the rest of the franchise, because for the life of me I have NO recollection of ever seeing Buttons & Rusty anywhere other than The Christmas Tree Train. Launching a new franchise with a seasonal special that can be re-aired ever year is a smart idea, and it seems to have been enough to keep new Chucklewood Critters projects coming out all the way until 1999… SOMEWHERE. I never saw a single one of ‘em, though, just the one we had on tape. And it’s a charming enough little cartoon, if thoroughly unremarkable. I mentioned a song from The Christmas Tree Train in a blog post I did last year, and I’ll repeat myself here: this feels like the sort of cheapo thing Hanna-Barbara was cranking out a full decade earlier, any anyone expecting better will be thoroughly disappointed. That said, it’s juuuuust competent enough for the sloppy animation and clichéd writing to take on a bit of an “awww shucks, at least it’s trying” charm. Not to the almost-homemade-looking levels of A Charlie Brown Christmas, obviously, but enough to keep me revisiting it every year.

Next, there’s the holiday sequel/spin-off/remake to something else, the king of which will always be A Very Merry Cricket to me. I’ve seen Chuck Jones’s original adaptation of George Selden’s A Cricket In Time’s Square maybe twice in my life, at the VERY most. I vaguely remember it being fine, roughly on par with all those other 70s-era animated specials they’d have on tape at the library or that Nickelodeon would air on Special Delivery back before they made their own shows. Even then, there was never even the slightest hint that Chester the Cricket had any kind of pop cultural relevance, certainly not enough to support a Christmas spin-off. And yet, A Very Merry Cricket was indeed cranked out the same year as the original, and while the seasonal spin-off SHOULD have even less staying power than the original, I know this one by heart. Like, literally. I barely remember a thing about A Cricket In Time’s Square, but I could recite A Very Merry Cricket line by line from memory. I’ve watched this special at least once every single year I’ve been alive to do so. And it’s not even that great a special. What I DO remember of A Cricket In Time’s Square is that A Very Merry Cricket built around literally the same set piece that was the original's climax. Like, they even make a musical number out of “We Did It Before (and we can do it again)” to lampshade the fact that they’re rehashing the moment. And even if they didn’t, there’s a full flashback to recap the original special just to make SURE you know what they’re doing (and, you know, to fill out the run time). But none of that matters. I still watch this ode to finding a glimmer of Christmas spirit in the grimy hellscape of 70s New York every year, thanks to a certain VHS compilation conditioning me to do so. The weird disco version of "Winter Wonderland" used as a travel montage here is one of those things I really REALLY wish I could find on a soundtrack album somewhere. Heck, the entire soundtrack to A Very Merry Cricket would be a great thing for some pop culture oddities company to put out, to really showcase Israel Baker's violin work. At least, I think so, since our Christmas Tape already burned that music into my memory anyway.

And then there’s the random Christmas episode of a show you otherwise weren’t watching, and this one’s a bit of a combo breaker for me. As you can see by the previous items, our Christmas Tape selection was heavy on the animated side. Yeah, big surprise that the guy who draws comics grew up watching a lot of cartoons, huh? But while there are plenty of animated Christmas episodes that outlived their shows to choose from (Hi there, Christmas Comes To Pac-Land), the standout on our Christmas Tape is a puppet show. An 80’s Christian children’s puppet show called Quigley's Village. And yeah, I know that half the Internet perked up at the mention of “Christian” and “Puppet” in the same sentence and are hoping for some cringy unintentional nightmare fuel, but I’ll have to disappoint you on that front. Oh, Quigley’s Village is still a show from the 80’s designed to teach children, so there’s all the questionable fashion and permanent smiles and aggressively non-threatening atmosphere you’d expect from any show of that type. I suppose if you have a crippling phobia of Cosby Sweaters then Quigley’s Village would be creepy to you. But by low budget religious kid show standards, Quigley’s Village is fairly above average, largely because the puppets don’t suck. It’s no Jim Henson, obviously, but the fact that Quigley’s Village is mostly populated by anthropomorphic animals means the show can avoid the uncanny valley pitfalls that send so many other shows straight to the creepy side of YouTube. A Quigley’s Village Christmas is, again, a profoundly average kid’s puppet show: everybody’s putting on a Christmas pageant, one of the kids is being greedy about presents, lessons are learned about selfishness and giving, blah blah blah. The reason this one stick out in my memory so much is the songs. MOTHER OF MERCY, but this show knew how to produce some insidious ear worms. When science finally learns to fully map the brain, mine will be at least 30% occupied by a puppet lion singing about how many presents he wants. Every single note of that tune is permanently embedded into my synapses.  EVERY. SINGLE. NOTE. I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to, and yet, most of you don’t even know this show existed in the first place. Such is the weirdness of The Christmas Tape.

I could go on.  There’s an entire rant I could go on involving a fallen Christmas tree, us Southerners' complex about snow in December, and a song from The Town That Forgot Christmas… but I’ll leave that to your imaginations. And yes, as I said up top, I realize this whole “Christmas Tape” phenomena isn’t just limited to 80s/90s video technology. Having a personal snapshot of pop culture that’s disproportionately important to you spans all mediums and times of year. Heck, I can personally attest to this fact, since my family had Christmas Tapes on CASSETTE too! Anyone who read either of those Obscure Christmas song blogs has already heard this, but in the late '80s my Dad filled a couple cassette tapes with an Atlanta Easy Listening station’s Christmas Eve broadcast, and those tapes influenced my holiday musical tastes even more than our VHS collection influenced my taste in Christmas Specials. There is NO other way my grade school self would ever have listened to The Boston Pops or Mannheim Steamroller, let alone actually grown an attachment to them. And yes, the same “holiday staples to literally nobody else” Christmas Tape phenomena is at play with the music found on those tapes. I can’t organize songs in the same way I organized TV specials, though, so let’s come up with some new categories to give this rant some sense of order. I’ll say “Songs Nobody Plays Anymore,” “VERSIONS Of Songs Nobody Plays Anymore,”  and “Non-Christmas Songs The Radio Station Just Played Because They Mention Winter.”

That last one’s an obvious point of contention, since a lot of “official” Christmas songs are only tenuously connected to the holiday by some mention of cold weather. I’m lookin’ at YOU “Let It Snow.” But ultimately, all that REALLY matters is popular consensus, if enough people play a song around Christmastime, it becomes a Christmas standard. And that’s the thing: I don’t think I’ve EVER heard anybody play John Denver’s “Aspenglow” or Gordon Lightfoot’s “Song For A Winter’s Night” in a Christmas context outside of our Christmas Tapes. But because one programming director at one Atlanta station got creative in stretching out their playlist for Christmas Eve, now I’M always going to think of them in that context. (Admittedly, the version of "Aspenglow" on our tape really was off a John Denver Christmas album, but my whole point is that he'd ALREADY recorded it once as just a regular "my hometown is great" song.)

As for the other two, I COULD easily cover both simultaneously by talking about “Christmas Is…” since our Christmas Tape is the only reason why I even know Percy Faith’s attempt to re-write “The Christmas Song” even exists, let alone that I prefer forgotten crooner Jack Jones’ version over Faith’s original. But, well, I kind of already said all I have to say about that song in that Obscure Christmas Song blog I keep bringing up. Instead, I’ll tackle both separately with different pics.

I’ve always said that people who hate Christmas songs would probably hate them a lot less if more of the THOUSANDS of cover versions of each that exist actually got played more often instead of repeating the same five over and over and over again. Thus, unfamiliar versions of familiar songs are quite important to me. Our Christmas Tape had plenty, such as an almost unrecognizable Jazz guitar version of “Silver Bells” by Jay Leno sideman Kevin Eubanks, or a paradoxically tropical slide-guitar rendition of “Winter Wonderland” by Chet Atkins. But the one that most owns my nostalgia is a version of “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” by Keath Barrie. The general public knows this song as sung by Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby, and a slew of others, but no, the only version included on our Christmas Tape was by Keath Barrie. You have no idea who Keath Barrie is. I feel fairly confident in this because even Shazam doesn’t know who Keath Barrie is, I had a HECK of a time tracking down the identity of the artist for this song. And the funny thing is, our tape TOTALLY has the DJ banter announcing who he was, but… well, just look at that name: “Keath Barrie.” What you see when it’s written is NOT what you hear when it’s said. I spent ages searching for a “Keith Berry” who didn’t exist before a fluke typo accidentally sent Google towards the guy’s actual name. And even then, late-70s German/Canadian balladeers don’t seem to have much of a footprint on the Internet because I still found very little of the guy’s stuff available online (though I DID find a clip of him performing this very song on quite possibly the most boring Christmas Special ever filmed). I’m not even sure how a radio station down in Atlanta even had a holiday album by Canada’s version of Roger Whittaker in their vaults to begin with, but they did (actually, there was also an abundance of Anne Murray on those tapes too, THIS STATION WAS INFILTRATED BY CANADIANS!), and now that one version of “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” will always be the one that come to mind first for me. And it’s not even that great a version! Barrie’s vocals are fine, in a big classy baritone sort of way, but the backing… I’m just gonna say it, if a stereotypical airport lounge singer performed a terrible version of “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” in an SNL sketch, this is the backing he would use. You can practically hear the band’s leisure suits as they play. Again, it’s not bad, but anybody who doesn’t have my high tolerance for kitsch will have NO idea how I can have an affection for this song, Christmas Tape or no Christmas Tape.

And that’s NOTHING compared to my “Song Nobody Plays Anymore” pick. Again, our Christmas Tape had several choices, such as “And The Bells Rang” as performed by Deam Martin spin-off act The Golddiggers, but the single most “ONLY I HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THIS IS” song on these tape is easily Richard Wintergarten’s “The Little Christmas Tree (instrumental).” Right away, I feel a little bad talking smack about this guy, because apparently he was dying of cancer at the time his one Christmas album was recorded, and it was something of a last-ditch effort to preserve his songs while there was still time. But the thing is… Okay, you see that little parenthetical note about how this is the INSTRUMENTAL version of the song? Well, there’s a reason for that. Richard Wintergarten's singing sounds like the terrible airport lounge singer that SHOULD have been singing with the band backing Keath Barrie. From a writing standpoint, “The Little Christmas Tree” is solid enough in a 70s Easy Listening sort of way. I weirdly feel like it could have been theme music for some kind of show staring Michael Landon. But man, there’s a reason this radio station ONLY played the instrumental version… and a reason why the record label released instrumental versions of the songs in the first place. (The lyrics aren't even that great anyway, just another of the fifty or so songs about how trees TOTALLY LOVE getting chopped down and dragged into our living rooms) And yet, here I am talking about it, because that radio station DID play “The Little Christmas Tree” while our tape was running, and now it’s eternally a part of my own personal Christmas tradition. I’m not sure if that's heartwarming or really weird, or both at once, but I do know that it just IS.

OH! OH! And this is one case where I actually CAN talk about weird, random fragments of local stations doing odd seasonal bumpers that were never meant to be remembered! Our Christmas Tapes still tried to avoid commercials, but we had enough DJ blabbing recorded that we caught a few VERY awkward Seasons Greetings segments from various Atlanta-area businesses. I tell ya, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas to me until I’ve heard some bored office drones from Decatur Federal reading off a script to wish me a happy holiday. Oh, Fran From Systems & Programing, you were just doing what your bosses told you, drafted into a campaign to make your savings & loans association look more personable. You probably never even heard your bit play on air, since the stuff Dad recorded was playing pretty late at night. I bet you forgot you'd even done it by New Years. You had no idea that some dork would still be listening to your awkward line read over thirty years later. And yes, I still listen to it.  I'm SUCH a dork that I not only reconstructed out tape's playlist on iTunes, but I even recorded MP3s of all the bumpers, JUST to preserve this tiny little fragment of Christmas history after that last cassette tape finally falls apart. Such is the magical weirdness of The Christmas Tape.