Re: Tis the Season

Corny and obvious, but "A Christmas Story"( love that lamp!), and "It's a Wonderful Life" help make it complete for me. But the real nostalgia trip I enjoy is a DVD of some old stop-motion animated shorts that Frazier Thomas used to run on WGN-TV channel 9 during holiday epsiodes of "Garfield Goose and Friends" in the 60's.

The films are even older than that show, they were made by a company called Centaur films and not too much is known about them (wiki and youtube have samples). One is called "Hardrock, Coco, and Joe" and is about three elves that help Santa fly the sleigh and make deliveries.

A second short is "Suzy Snowflake" (um, be careful how you google image search for that one, leave your filter on extra-careful setting, don't ask). Suzy the winter fairy flys thru town adding frost and snow with her magic wand to make the season pretty.

Anyhow, they are not especially GOOD animations, but for millions of old Chicagoans they hit a super-sentimental nostalgic chord as a mainstay of their childhood TV memories. It's like how hearing the "Little Drummer Boy" song will make you tear up unexpectedly, thinking back to childhood Christmas times past, and people long gone. Guess I'm overly sentimental.

A local furniture store dug up copies of these films a couple years back, and had them professionally cleaned up and burned to DVD as a way to get people to come into the store (to get a free copy).

Brilliant marketing, as the DVD also contains their humerous commercials and some cute and goofy intro hosting bits to the animations. Do you know of another furniture company who's promo DVD becomes a family heirloom, played every year?