And to you, as well! Enjoy. Maybe this time Santa won’t be such a jerk…
The U.S. Postal Service is offering Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stamps this year! The good news: Hermey’s name is spelled correctly. The bad news: Yukon Cornelius got left out.
They’ll be available Nov. 6: http://stampproducts.com/stamps/rudolph-red-nosed-reindeer
Wait, is it that time already? Oh, this is a stamp announcement. Whew.
Bah! A premature Rudolphing!
(I kid, I kid.)
50 years on the air. This year, Tuesday the 9th.
75 years since the publication of the book.
And 14 years on the SDMB.
Great thundering icebergs!
Good evening, Clarice.
- Rudolph “Hannibal” Donner
This thread has given me a new appreciation for the classics. For me it’s not the holidays without this thread to make me question my childhood. I was eagerly awaiting its bumpage.
Bumbles bounce!
I wonder about the science of bouncing bumbles. How can anything bounce in the snow anyway? Also it is interesting to note that bumbles also sink. Most bouncing items float. Yukon and his dogs would have to cling to the upside of the plummeting bumble, and then, on the bounce, manage not to be crushed on the rebound. The whole “bouncing” explanation sounds highly improbable.But why would Yukon lie?
Yeah, back in the early sixties we just put the mentally ill into institutions … or dumped them on strange islands in the Arctic.
But, couldn’t King Moonracer fly around the Earth really, really fast, go the the future, and come back?
Ha!
Those elves are making really crappy gifts.
Obviously. I mean, who ever heard of an iPad made out of wood?
“And when Yukon Cornelius woke up, he found that it was all a dream.”
“One morning, when Yukon Cornelius woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible Bumble”.
… with no teeth!
“There was me, that is Sam the Snowman, and my three droogs, that is Hermey, Cornelius, and Bumble. And we sat in the Santa’s Workshop canteen trying to make up our razoodocks what to do for Christmas.”
Let’s be fair now. We can’t judge those mid-twentieth century elf gifts by today’s standards.
While we don’t know the exact year of the big snowstorm, we can deduce that it had to be sometime in the late fifties or early sixties. The show was broadcast in 1964. Sam the Snowman tells us things are running well this year, so the storm was not in 1964. Sam does not say “last year” regarding the big snow, which he would have if it had been in 1963. Probably not 1962, as Sam most surely would have said “a couple of years ago.” So we are talking 1961 at the latest. From the newspaper headlines at the start of the show, we know this is a time when Russian satellites are in the news, so we are post 1957. (I tried to google and find out if there was a point in history when the Sanitation Army routinely dug folks out of the snow, but that went nowhere. Indeed, information on the Sanitation Army as a whole is severely lacking on the internet.)
In any case, toys at that time were different than they are today. Expectations were different too. Television was still in its infancy, so most children had not been bombarded with the sort of crass advertising that might make them look down on simpler toys. Santa also provides these toys (for free, mind you) to children all over the world. While we may turn up our noses at the little wooden gifts made by the elves, a lot of poor kids across the world in 1960 would only have been too happy to have them.
We don’t have a glimpse into today’s North Pole toymaking culture and therefore can’t accurately comment on whether the elves are still making and painting wooden toys or whether they have a whole wing of the castle now producing electronica and Transformers-related products. But let’s please not judge the toymaking from 1960 by today’s standards.
Thanks. You just made my day.
I remember some of the toys we had in the '60’s and they were actually a little dangerous (kids today are so pampered!*) so wooden toys and the danger of a nasty splinter would fit right in.
*Get off my lawn!
That’s what you get when you buy it from the back of a truck.