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Somewhere around five years ago, with Christmas in July gathering in popularity all the time, I decided that I would use the white tree originally bought to display Easter ornaments, to display some Christmas ornaments during the cold winter months in Australia.
The wins were many – we got some colour and whimsy into the loungeroom, ornaments that normally spent 10 months in a box got extra outside time and I got to indulge my love of Christmas right in the middle of the long wait between festive seasons.
Having a Christmas in July tree up has been a real joy and lots of fun and it’s kickstarted a mid-year festive block of posts on this blog, giving me a chance to read Christmas books, listen to Christmas music and watch Christmas programs and movies well and truly out of the standard season.
Can you two “most wonderful times of the year”?
I say “YES!” with tinsel on and baubles hanging from all the letters, and if all it does is give is a little escape from the hellscape that is this war-torn, climate change-ravaged world, then it’s done its job.
And me being me, I keep buying Christmas ornaments during the year so here are five new “old” ones, all of them from the now sadly-defunct Carlton Cards range which was doing pop culture ornaments long before its rival Hallmark Cards really got in on the game …
I was fixated with TV shows about cute, all-knowing animals as a kid and among the Flippers and Gentle Bens of the 1960s and 1970s, I loved watching Lassie do her thing. Originating in a 1938 short story by Eric Knight, that later became a 1940 full-length novel, Lassie Come-Home, Lassie was a female Rough Collie who was able to save the day over and over again. She not only knew when things were wrong or about to go wrong but she was also the endlessly capable saviour of the day. Everyone loved her but how could you not? She was sweet, devoted, and in a long line of TV shows and movies – the TV series Lassie, which begin in 1954 and ran for some 19 years and is the one I watched growing up – she saved the day many times over and won our hearts as she did so. This is my second Lassie ornament and it harkens back to a sweeter, kinder time when dogs could save the day and make the world a better place into the bargain.
Rightly acknowledged as one of the comedy greats of this and any age, Charlie Chaplin, aka Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was a giant star of the client era, working as a comic actor, filmmaker and composer who was both extraordinarily funny and able to skewer societal inequality and dictators with equal alacrity. His comedy was fearsomely intelligent and delightfully silly in one, and as his best known screen persona, the Trump, who you see represented in this ornament, Chaplin made the world laugh, think and proved that funny people could also take control of their careers to brilliantly effective impact. I used to watch his movies and shorts on public TV here in Australia and it was in those moments of pure comedic escape that I found possibly the same release as his audiences all those years ago when he first set out to charm the world.
He may not be as well known as some other fictional mice out there but Mighty Mouse was one of my big favourites growing up. Created by the Terrytoons studio for 20th Century Fox, Mighty Mouse, first called Super Mouse, made his debut in 1942 in the cartoon short The Mouse of Tomorrow. By his eighth short in 1944, The Wreck of the Hesperus, he was finally Mighty not Super, carrying the name by which he is now known through some 80 theatrical shorts which ended their run with Cat Alarm in 1961. He has some revivals of course, including as one of the central characters in the The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle (1979-80), and while it’s possible this is where I came across him, it is also likely his cartoons were still running on TV which seemed to still, be drawing on content from decades earlier as I grew up.
Oh how I loved The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends when I was a kid. The series, which ran from 1959 to 1964, before I was born I might add, was still going strong as I grew up and while it might have been shown on the sole local commercial channel, I distinctly remember watching the show very early in the morning whenever we visited my grandparents in Sydney, about 10 hours drive south of my home on the Far North Coast of NSW. Along with the Thunderbirds, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends would kick off the holiday cartoon schedule during school holidays and after turning on the TV very carefully – my grandparents’ huge TV was a slightly wonky and always started with the volume on full so one of us had to hit the “on” button while the other sat ready to dial down the volume completely and instantly to avoid waking the whole apartment – we watch rapt, giggling quietly away at the clever intelligence of a show that managed to be goofy and fiendishly satirical all at once.
Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol was one of the mainstays of Christmas programming when I was a child. First telecast in 1962, the adaptation of Charlies Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, featured Mr. Magoo, who first popped up in 1949 in the short The Ragtime Bear for the UPA animation studio, as good old Ebenezer Scrooge. The special has the distinction of being the first one to be produced specifically for TV and has Jim Backus, better known as Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island, as the voice of the pompous Mr. Magoo. Sadly, the special was produced as UPA was winding down as an animation studio, unable to meet the demands of TV for mass production of cartoons for television. Whatever Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol might have represented for its parent studio, it was a cosy and illuminating watch and was likely the first time I encountered Dickens classic which of course is now everywhere as the prime source for festive storytelling imagination.