Belated Christmas

I've reached the point in my project of dubbing off VHS tapes to DVD that I'm working on some Christmas things. Today I transferred two things that I did not have a chance to watch this year.

The main feature was The Gathering, a 1977 film starring Ed Asner and Maureen Stapleton. Asner plays a stubborn businessman who has been estranged from his wife and family since his youngest son decided to escape to Canada instead of participate in the Vietnam War. Then he discovers that he has only a few months to live and realizes how much he has lost due to his attitude. With the help of his wife (Stapleton), he asks his children to gather at the family home for Christmas (without telling them about his condition). This is an award-winning movie that has been absent from television for too long--and which should be on DVD. Bootleg copies sell on e-Bay for about fifty dollars!

(Interestingly enough, the producers of this film were Hanna-Barbera--which is why you see a stuffed Yogi Bear briefly. A film further away from Jellystone Park you can hardly imagine.)

To fill in the rest of the DVD I placed the well-loved Christmas episode of the 1968 series, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, starring Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare. This was one of two episodes that appealed to the 'shippers of Carolyn and Captain Gregg's romance, the other being "The Medicine Ball." I discovered looking through my tape index that, of all the half-hour television episodes having to do with Christmas, the only one I've saved on tape is this one! (Well, there are the Lassie Christmas episodes with Timmy, but I already have those on professional DVD.)

In the meantime, I am reading another of Robert Brenner's Schiffer Christmas collectors' books. This is Christmas: 1940-1959 and covers the ornaments, lights, and other home decorations used in those years. As I've said before, I like the Schiffer books because they are not just endless pages of photos of things with prices on them. Brenner talks about the different decorations and how they were used and adapted around wartime shortages during not only World War II but also during the Korean War.

The text portions also include photos of real homes decorated for the holidays and people gathered around the tree. The later 1950s photos reminded me vividly of my childhood home--especially the awful wallpaper! (I didn't see the paisley pattern we used to have in our living room, though.) I found out that the yellowed plastic Santa and reindeer with the one broken runner that my mom still puts on the tree probably dates back to the 1940s and that our manger figures were probably from Japan (our Mary and Joseph are pictured in the book, although our Jesus was in a real wooden manger with straw in it rather than on a ceramic base that looked like hay that is shown). We used to buy the figures by the each at Woolworth's or Grant's in bins for each figure. You started with your basic figures--the Holy Family, the Three Kings, a shepherd or two--and then added extras: more sheep, a sheep dog, the camel driver, a flutist, a farmer carrying eggs. We even still had rubber figures--two of the three camels and a sheep--that you stuffed with newspaper and Kleenex to give them more of a solid look.