(via Shutterstock)
It will be pretty obvious if you have even so much as glanced at my blog, that I love pop culture everything.
I spend my days, when I am not forced to work to pay for everything pop culture-oriented, watching movies, streaming shows, listening to music, reading books (so many fabulous books!) and even consuming all kinds of cool and imaginatively creative graphic novels.
It’s good for the heart, mind and soul, and apart from obviously blogging about it all, I love covering my Christmas trees in all kinds of pop culture ornaments.
I’d like to say I only buy a few near Christmas but we all know that’s not true, and so all across the year, I am hunting down the next wonderful ornaments to go on the tree, of which the following 15 are so my favourites for 2024 …
It’s hard to believe that Home Alone ever had an actual release date because it’s become so much a part of our lives. But it did in fact go wide and big in cinemas way back in 1990, catapulting Macaulay Culkin to superstardom (which didn’t completely work out for him, sadly) and introducing all kinds of phrases into the lexicon, including, most famously, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal.” What really the film a classic for many people is that it seamlessly mixed together screwball comedy as Culkin’s character, Kevin McAllister does his best to fight two dimwitted thieves played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, and some real heartrending and heartwarming moments such as when Kevin tells a Santa impersonator that “Will you please tell Santa that instead of presents this year, I just want my family back.” It’s a beguiling mix of silly comedy and real Christmas heart and it works beautifully, to the extent that it’s the sort of film you want to see year after year or it just doesn’t feel like Christmas.
Schroeder + Woodstock (Peanuts)
Two characters who don’t get the loving they deserve in Charles M. Schulz’s immortally iconic comic strip series, Peanuts, are Beethoven-loving, toy piano-playing Schroder, who’s always having to fight off the amorous advances of Lucy, and dear sweet fluffy balls of feathers, Woodstock, Snoopy’s hilariously stroppy avian buddy who may be small but who absolutely knows how to look after himself. They are delightful the both of them and pivotal, in a key supporting character kind of way, to the overall feel and narrative of Peanuts. While the ornaments themselves aren’t connected, I love the fact that this year I found both of these characters and in a gorgeously retro style.
Schroeder
Woodstock
Scooby-Doo! (lunch box)
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.
A fairytale witch who made her first appearance in 1954’s Looney Tunes short, Bewitched Bunny, Witch Hazel, created by Chuck Jones, was first voiced by Bea Benaderet before being replaced by June Foray. Green-skinned and highly stylised, Witch Hazel was a treat to watch, all hilarious physicality and high-pitched cackle whose name, according to Wikipedia, “is a pun on the witch-hazel plant and folk remedies based on it.” While she was supposed to have longevity as a character, she’s hung around quite nicely, making an appearance as recently as 2018 when she was voiced by Eric Bauza. This ornament is a delight and I love it not simply because it captures the character perfectly, but because it evokes my long love of Looney Tunes perfectly.
While Miss Bianca and Bernard are best known from the 1977 Disney animated film, it’s the six books by British author Marjery Sharp (with illustrations by Gareth Williams) that enchanted me back in the 1970s, such that while I no doubt would’ve borrowed them from the local library – for a small town of 3000, we had an excellent, brilliantly well-stocked library – I spent much of my pocket money for months buying the series up at Dymocks bookshop in Lismore. I fell in love with these two characters, their devotion to each other and their marvellous adventures rescuing the less fortunate or in trouble among us. The best part is that the movie captured the spirit of the book and the integrity of the characters beautifully, evoking everything I loved about the books and even, rather remarkably, adding something extra too.
It’s funny how a movie you once cared only so little about can suddenly, after a re-watch, end up getting so deep in your affections that it’s highly unlikely it will ever get out. That’s precisely what happened with Monsters. Inc which I liked but didn’t love back in 2001 but which on repeat viewing twenty years later, suddenly hit me like a profoundly moving ton of bricks. Central to this wonderful piece of animated feature filmmaking is the relationship between monster Sulley (John Goodman) whose job involves scaring children to generate energy for Monstropolis and Boo (Mary Gibbs), a girl who follows Sulley back through the door at the back of her closet and causes all kinds of hilarious. Grabbing this 2021 ornament seems like the perfect way of marking my new love affair with this Pixar classic which stands as a great example of why the studios films are so greatly loved and revered, even decades later.
I adore just about every Pixar film ever released but by far and away one of my great favourite in a crowded field of favourites is 2009’s UP, the story of one man’s quest to fulfill a lifelong promise to his beloved wife who is no longer with him. Along the way Carl (voiced by the late great Ed Asner) acquires some new friends in the form of Russell (Jordan Nagai) and Dug the dog (Bob Peterson) who win your hearts over and then some and who find rambunctiously funny and lovingly communal form in this ornament which seems the most unlikeliest of friends/found family on a fun-filled snow ride.
Dr Seuss Thing One Thing Two (The Cat in the Hat)
Who doesn’t love the poetically rhythmic cadence of a Dr Seuss story? Not only do the words bounce and sing off the vest with real zest and vibrancy but they are FUN to read and listen to, playful yet full of much meaning. Theodor Seuss Geisel, to use his full, non pen name, was a master of mixing the silly and the serious, and in so doing, giving us a raft of characters big and small including Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Cat in the Hat, which published in 1957. They were quite the handful, with this ornament capturing this description from the Dr Seuss Wiki:
They were released from the box the Cat brought to introduce to Conrad, Sally, and the Fish. The Things later caused mischief by recklessly flying kites in the house, which bumped the wall and knocked everything down their path. Conrad was able to stop the Things with a net. They were also taken away by the Cat, who put them back in the box.
There are sitcoms that amuse and entertain before slipping off into the barely-remembered televisual ether, and then there are classics like The Golden Girls, which rang from 1985-92, and which is not only fiercely remembered but very much loved. Whether it was Blanche (Rue McClanahan) going man crazy, Dorothy (Bea Arthur) delivering a withering out down, Rose (Betty White) embarking on a rambling story or Sophie (Estelle Getty) remembering life in old Sicily and imparting a sage truth, The Golden Girls was warm, funny, excoriating when it wanted to be, and it honestly felt like family. Which is, I think, why so many people love it and why, all these years later, people want to gather around a cheesecake, talk and catch up and “thank you for being a friend”.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Santa Sonic
I have never been a video game player. It’s not that I have anything against them, although those times I have tried to play some, I haven’t been that good, but I really predate them in a big way and thus, they were never really one of the things I got into. Sure I knew many of the characters such as Mario Bros, and of course, Sonic the Hedgehog but that was more in the context of pop culture ubiquity than as a figure in a game. Where I have really gotten to know Sonic is through the films which I have seen with my nephews and nieces, and honestly, they are a lot of fun. I love the go-get-’em determination of Sonic and his friends and the way the films mix heart and hilarity and action to great effect. Having a Christmas just makes perfect sense and it’s great to welcome this iconic blue figure, Santa hat in place, to my tree.
Sequels are always a bit touch and go. The novelty value is long gone usually and the story has to duck and dodge nostalgia and hardened expectation while trying to say something nice and new. Thankfully, Inside Out 2 manages it quite beautifully, harkening back to its predecessor without being a slavish copy of it. This time around, Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is hitting puberty and in no time flat, the well ordered world of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Fear (Tony Hale) is thrown into chaos as Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Ediburi), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Houser) thrown a complete emotional spanner in the works. It’s messy and chaotic but somehow everyone gets there in the end and Riley, and her emotions makes an accommodation with this big new chapter of her life.
If you have ever worked in an office, and especially in one for the public service or a member association of any kind, you will be familiar with the likes of Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in Parks and Recreation (2009-2015) who is officious and do-gooding and wants to make a difference. At the start of the show she’s all business and not so good at the personal stuff, but over the course of seven very funny, mock-doco season, she became someone who still wanted to do a whole lot of public good but who understood the rest of life mattered too. So, she kept that hilariously lovely idealism of hers, but made it more pragmatic and grounded, and in the process, made her even more loveable, which is captured in the blue sky dreaming look of this new Hallmark ornament.
I have watched and loved a lot of Star Trek in my life, and Voyager aside, which was good but not really my thing, it’s been a joy to “boldly go where no one has gone before”. The latest very cool and brilliantly imaginative addition to the burgeoning franchise is Strange New Worlds, centred on a per-Kirk Enterprise crew, commanded by Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and including some familiar faces like Spock (Ethan Peck) and Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), who go on some pretty incredible adventures, all in the name of science, galactic goodwill and making the universe a better place. This ornament features Pike in the captain’s chair and while the face isn’t quite right, it captures sometimes vexed face of the character quite nicely.
Batman (The classic TV Series)
I know everyone knows Batman as the tortured, PTSD-weighted soul of DC Comics legend but in the 1960s, he was goofy, groovy and technicolour and hilarious. Not being a child of superhero comics, this was how I discovered Batman, with the biffs, bams and pows and the comic book villains who got away with stuff at first but who, always, ended up bested by the very camp Caped Crusader (Adam West) and his sidekick, Robin (Burt Ward). One of the great enduring gags of the show was when the two would climb up the side of a building – why not use the stairs or lift? Well, where’s the fun in that, haha?! – using rope secured to the top of the structure by Batman’s grappling hook (his belt was FULL of stuff to a hugely amusing but ultimately useful degree) and someone would pop their heads out of a window and express surprise that, and fair enough too, two people were poking their heads out of a window. Batman, of course, thought it was perfectly normal, all part of the weird silliness of this hugely enjoyable show.
I watched a TON of Hanna-Barbera cartoons growing up, and while I have my offbeat favourites, I also loved many of the iconic characters like Yogi Bear (voiced for decades by Daws Butler), who debuted in 1958 on The Huckleberry Hound Show as a supporting character, and who used wit, guile and brazen chutzpah to best his nemesis Ranger Smith (primarily voiced by Don Messick and Greg Burson) to get the ever-desired “pic-a-nic basket”. He was so entertaining to watch along with his sweet sidekick Boo Boo Bear, and for a kid who did all the right things and stayed within his lane because he was a minister’s son and had to, someone like Yogi was all the fun-filled and hilarious naughty I could never pursue. Which is why, years later, I still love the guy and his ability to live his best life always.