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Forget decking the halls … at least for right now!
With Christmas almost upon us, adding more pop culture ornaments to my tree is the order of the day, and yes, while I buy far too many new ones every year – is there such a thing? I mean, really? – they do make my heart glad as I add characters I have known and loved for decades onto the now 7 foot / 210 cm tree at the centre of my loungeroom.
I have always adored all kinds of stories told in written, animated or visual form and choosing to reflect this on my tree some three decades ago was one of the best decisions I ever made.
I am old enough that I watched Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! on early TV reruns, along with my brother and two sisters as we snuggled under blankets on the couch during winter school holidays, sugar-filled cereal in our hands and Scooby and the gang solving mysteries in funny, cosily predictable fashion. He made the school holidays even better than they were otherwise were – no bullies for two weeks; BLISS – and he also saved me following the sudden death of my dad in 2016 when a hospital visit to read to him while he recuperated became a near-instantaneous mourning of his passing. I would’ve crashed and burned even more than I did without Scooby (in this case, Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! which was offbeat but I adore it still) and I will be forever grateful to this food-obsessed, hilariously scaredy cat Great Dane who didn’t just get the bad guys and gals but also made me laugh when I needed it the most.
One of the lovely things that Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, used to screen when I was a kid back in the 1970s were black and white films, many of them silent, featuring great comedians of 1930s and 1940s like Laurel and Hardy and, of course, Charlie Chaplin. While the talented actor and writer produced a huge body of work over more than sixty years of active work in the movie industry, it was as the iconic The Tramp that I remember him. You wouldn’t think a kid would be interested in watching silent films about comedians of my grandparents’ generation but I gobbled all his films, short and long up, and so finding this ornament of Chaplin as The Tramp, from the now sadly-defunct Carlton Cards line of ornaments was a real joy and a pleasure to add to my tree.
I loed Miffy growing up with one or two of the books I read growing up still in a tub of my childhood things (I have two huge tubs of stuff as it turns out; what can I say? I’m sentimental). The character, created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, first appeared in book form in 1955 before going on to feature in thirty more. Not only that but there have been four TV series, all kinds of mercy and even, in 2013, a feature-length film, Miffy the Movie. What captured me was the simplicity of the lines, the vivid colours used and the sweetness and light at the heart of Miffy’s world. It made me feel like the world could be a wondrously good place and because of that, even as an adult, I find real comfort in this lovely character who has been rendered in this ornament bought from Australia store Typo in the loveliest way possible.
It seems more than appropriate that at Christmas in the 75th anniversary year of Charles M. Schulz’s classic comic strip, Peanuts, that one its characters make it into a festive ornaments post but that it be Spike, Snoopy’s hermit-inclined desert-dwelling and super thin brother. Schulz described Spike as “a beautiful example of images evoked by a location: we know he lives with the coyotes outside Needles, and that’s about all we know. There is about him, with his thin, faintly exotic mustache and soulful eyes …” and he stands in marked contrast to his brother’s idiosyncratic, garrulous hilarity. Finding this ornament was a joy, adding to my huge Peanuts Christmas ornament collection which has its own tree this year, separate to the main one, with Spike one of the starring new additions.
Batman and Robin (classic ’60s look)
Imagine my surprise, as a kid who only read a small number of serious comic books including those of a superhero variety – I was more inclined to use my pocket money to buy Hanna-Barbera and British comic books like Krazy and Whizzer and Chips – when I discovered that Batman was actually a VERY SERIOUS and SUPER DARK character. In the only iteration of one of DC’s star superheroes I knew, 1960s Batman, which ran in reruns on the sole local commercial TV station in the early 1970s, the lead character was comical, almost slapsticky so, with OTT villains, lots of colour and movement and gloriously goofy graphics. It was fun, it was silly and sometimes tense, and I am delighted I tracked down this ornament which captures everything I loved, and still love, about the show.
“We wuz robbed!” The phrase, coined back in the 1930s by Joe Jacobs, the manager of then star-heavyweight boxer, Max Schmeling, perfectly captures how I and a legion of Star Trek fans worldwide felt when Paramount, which ignored how long an animated series can go on for if you keep writing and drawing well – think The Simpsons or Family Guy – decided to end Star Trek: Lower Decks after a five-year fun last December. This enormously clever and endlessly witty show did a brilliant job of both paying loving home to the franchise, launched with The Original Series back in the mid-60s, and affectionately skewering it too, centring on the non-office crew below decks (hence the name) of the USS Ceritos, one of Starfleet’s lower tier ships of the line. I miss the show terribly but one thing I am happy about is Hallmark releasing this ornament in two parts of lead characters, Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) who made Lower Decks so vibrantly silly, thoughtful and fun but who are lending that same playful verve to my tree.
One of the comic books I do remember reading as a kid were about the Fantastic Four, who debuted in The Fantastic Four #1 in November 1961, created by artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby and editor/co-scripter Stan Lee. Composed of Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), the Invisible Woman (Susan “Sue” Storm-Richards, the Human Torch (Johnny Storm), and the monstrous Thing (Ben Grimm) – they were essentially a family with the first two characters married, the third Sue’s brother and the final character an old friend of Reed’s from college. Far from having secret identities, the four former astronauts, transformed mysteriously in space on a mission so that they developed super powers, were very much out and about as celebrities, with their story told this year, rather wonderfully well, in this year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This ornament, released this year by Hallmark, recalls the animated series from 1967 that I recall watching as a kid and which remains one of the favourites to this day.
Discovering Baymax back in 2014 when Big Hero 6 hit cinema screens was one of life’s great joys. The beating heart and soul of the movie, Baymax, an inflatable healthcare robot who has a lot to learn about the world and who is endlessly amusing as he tries to do with the help of Hiro Hamada (Scott Adsit), the younger brother of Baymax’s sadly now dead older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney). As Hiro deals with his grief, and as a 14-year-old no less, Baymax and Tadashi’s friends, gritty Go Go (Jamie Chung), neurotic Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), bubbly Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) and comic book fan Fred (T. J. Miller) play a pivotal role and I love this ornament for reminding me once again how wonderful Baymax is and why we need more of him in our lives.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Yoda and Luke Skywalker)
The first trilogy of Star Wars films, now of course the middle trilogy, made my late 1970s-early 1980s childhood, a pretty magical place to be. And I needed that, beset by church-led judgment (my dad was a Baptist minister) and endless bullying at school, and so, being able to escape into a world, nay galaxy thank you, full of heroes and villains was a gift. I can’t precisely recall where I saw The Empire Strikes Back, but I remember being every bit as captivated in 1980 as I was in 1977 and loving how George Lucas extended the story into something wonderful big and exciting and yes, even dark. One of my favourite parts of the film is when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) meets Yoda (Frank Oz) and like him, we have idea the playful idiot Luke encounters is in fact a legendary Jedi master in hiding. This ornament gives you both the rigours of Luke’s training but Yoda’s playfulness, which might have been annoying in the beginning but which paid big dividends later on.
As a child of an era when Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies and Hanna-Barbera were everywhere on the telly, I am well and truly acquainted with the slapstick comedic brilliance of Tom and Jerry. They shot to near-instant fame in the 1940s, after their initial short film in 1940, Puss Gets the Boot (nominated for an Academy Award in Best Short Subject (Cartoon), led to 161 theatrical shorts for Metro Goldwin-Mayer, helmed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Lots of spinoff shows and movies followed, well into the 21st century, and I love how this 2025 Hallmark ornament captures the hilarity of the two characters who always delivered laughs, fun and even a little pathos.