Christmas is a season of gifts, though we’d be wise to make like the Magi and remember that the best presents need not come from under the tree.
One of the great delights of my Christmas life, in good times and in bad, are what I call baubles. They are not flashy presents and may possess a degree of seasonal ephemerality. We encounter them on the fly at Christmastime, and they always feel like a surprise in that we didn’t so much as go looking for them as that they happened to us.
Among these chief baubles of mine is Rankin/Bass Productions’ 1974 animated special, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It gets none of the fanfare of the likes of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” but that made it more embraceable to me whenever I first encountered it as a boy.
It felt special to even know about this special, and nothing to me looks more like Christmas, as if the holiday were encapsulated in the mise-en-scene and the message of this scrappy, tuneful offering.
The plot, of course, is a riff on Clement Clarke Moore’s poem about a man who steps from his bed while his wife and children slumber to observe St. Nicholas doing what St. Nicholas does. Only this time, there’s a parallel family — a mouse family — living in that same house.
The human father is a clockmaker, and he’s built a doozy at the town hall to please Santa with its melody as the chief elf flies through the night sky, but the eldest boy in the mouse family doesn’t believe in the guy in the red suit, so he sabotages the work.
A curious detail about the Rankin/Bass specials: Santa could be a vengeful fellow. He makes for a very Old Testament Santa. The wayward mouse learns the error of his ways, and sets to putting things right, ad it works out as you’d expect.
I’ve always been a Rudolph man — a Hermey the Elf action figure resides year-round atop a boot in the hallway outside my apartment door — but it’s this particular Rankin/Bass special that stays with me the most. Sort of like when someone gets you a gift that they know will resonate in your heart.
I still rock out with tunes like “Even a Miracle Needs a Hand,” which has always struck me as true enough. Everyone and everything needs a hand, and if “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” — and life itself — has a thesis, it is that.
It was never my intention to find the special. I encountered it once upon a childhood evening and I was touched. This is, I think, what we want from Christmas, and what we hope to give to others.
For with the bauble, there is wonder. The bauble is different from that which we put atop the Christmas list, be it literal or figurative, all in caps, because that’s what we think we want the most. But the things we like best are often the things that find us, or that we discover because we are open, which is itself a great gift.
At Christmastime, my parents would have us three kids pile into the car for what seemed like an ordinary drive, but then we’d turn off into neighborhoods decked to the hilt with lights, and that simple backseat became a playground of wonder.
A lesson of Christmas is that you are never just riding in a car unless you are committed to being a person who does only that and no more. And when that’s who you are, it’s harder to both get and give the presents you deserve and that others will cherish. They don’t come from Amazon, but rather the heart, and faith in the ineffable — the bauble — that has nothing to do with your god or my god or nobody’s god.
The only people I know who know about “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” are people I’ve shared it with. It runs. It’s not hard to find. But being a bauble, it touches more than it’s talked about.
Step inside the world of this animated Currier and Ives print this year — any year — before the clock strikes midnight for Christmas Day itself and partake of the bauble’s instructive lesson of light. That which we discover — or that which discovers us — is also that which guides. True if you’re a Magi, and true if you’re rocking out to one of Father Mouse’s festive tunes.
Colin Fleming (www.colinfleminglit.com) is the author of eight books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, among other publications.