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Check It Out: Christmas Entertainment A-List

Every Christmas season, a series of Christmas movies, television shows, and songs are aired. It’s A Wonderful Life and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (both the song and the television show) are perhaps among the most famous of them all, but I have decided to compile a list of my personal favorites (in no particular order).

1. A Christmas Carol (1938): among all the film adaptations of this Charles Dickens classic, this is my favorite, despite various differences from the novel (e.g. Scrooge’s fiancée leaving him not shown, the absence of the starving children Want and Ignorance). Such changes were made so it would be more of a family film. Nonetheless, it is worth watching. It is also available in both black & white and in color.

2. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989): the third movie of the National Lampoon’s saga and the funniest Christmas movie ever. In it, Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) is determined to provide the perfect Christmas for his family, despite all the hilarious mishaps. Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) adds to the endless humor. My favorite scenes from the movie are the KMA scene and what Clark wants to tell his boss after receiving a one-year jelly-of-the-month club membership as a Christmas bonus (I wonder how Obama and his cronies would react if someone said such remarks to their faces). When it first came out, one critic described it as a combination of It’s A Wonderful Life and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (not sure about that, but it is a classic nonetheless).

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965): Linus salvages Charlie Brown’s Christmas spirit (and telling him what Christmas is all about) in the climax of this television special by reciting the Gospel of Luke. Network executives were opposed to such an scene, but Charles Schultz persuaded them otherwise by telling them: “if we don’t tell the true meaning of Christmas, who will?”

4. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” (1979): this may have been the first of all the redneck-centered Christmas songs, with its country music-like theme and its mention of football and beer. I also liked the unofficial sequel “Rudolph Got Run Over by my Grandma” in which grandma gets tired of hearing about her being run over, and thus gets revenge. The songs are listed below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgIwLeASnkw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-8FqlMA3CI

5. “Redneck 12 Days of Christmas” (1995): a Jeff Foxworthy Christmas classic, with the gifts including three shotgun shells, two hunting dogs, and some parts to a Mustang GT. There’s also a few redneck jokes (e.g. If you think the nutcracker is something you did off the high-dive) as well as mention of Wal-Mart. The only flaws to this song are Foxworthy mistakenly saying spat instead of spam (he seems to have been running out of breath) and saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas (it is unclear why he would do that- perhaps he was pressured to do so by the politically correct crowd). The video is listed below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpQxrCqVoTc

May everyone have a Merry Christmas.

Image: Courtesy of: http://pasquinader.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html

Topics: Christmas Entertainment, A Christmas Carol, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, Rudolph Got Run Over by my Grandma, Redneck 12 Days of Christmas

Andrew Linn

Andrew Linn is a member of the Owensboro Tea Party and a former Field Representative for the Media Research Center. An ex-Democrat, he became a Republican one week after the 2008 Presidential Election. He has an M.A. in history from the University of Louisville, where he became a member of the Phi Alpha Theta historical honors society. He has also contributed to examiner.com and Right Impulse Media.

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