Visits

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Fathers Know Best

YouTube has been leading me on some interesting avenues down memory lane lately. I suppose that the site collects one's previous searches and then makes some computer generated guesses as to what a person might want to watch. Because I've looked up a few of the older Christmas movies, suggestions have popped up for old TV shows like Father Knows Best and the Ozzie and Harriett show. I may have seen these at a very young age--too young to remember them now--and so it has been a pleasure to watch them again, for the first time, essentially. Kind of like peering through a window to observe a Christmas Past, in the way that Ebinezer Scrooge peers through the window in Bob Cratchett's little home. We see very sharply for a moment things that have become very dim through time. The big difference, as it seems to me, between Christmas in these old TV shows and Christmas in contemporary stories, is that Christmas in the old stories was something that was stable, reliable, composed of a shared spirit, whereas Christmas in contemporary stories is always something of a worry, a time of stress and want, a conflict in and of itself. We identify now not with tradition and stability but with conflict, dissatisfaction, angst. The new Christmases generally make their way, through a struggle of one sort or another, back to the solid shores of the old Christmases. The old stories simply begin there and play themselves out in a sort of celebration of the eternal--family, tradition, love. Love, in the old, is something that you have; in the new, something that you seek. \


No comments: