My Life: So This is Christmas

I went to visit my 90-year-old mother and found her in the multipurpose room of her assisted living facility watching an old Andy Williams Christmas special. Maybe you remember those? The stage is sparkling with fake snow and everyone is wearing scarves and bright holiday sweaters, and Andy is crooning about the kind of Christmas not a one of us has ever had. After songs about chestnuts, sleigh bells, and jolly old Saint Nick, along comes a frisky quartet of tap-dancing reindeer and I’m not sure whether to laugh or groan, but when I look around the room, everyone seems transfixed. This stuff is like a drug.

I turn my attention back to the screen and focus on Andy. He looks rather dapper, in a mummified way, as he engages in a bit of banter with a Nashville-style singer dressed as a snow queen in a cloak and white stretch pants. After Andy and the Snow Queen do a number, the Osmond Brothers join the fun, and then a full-on choir as the spectacle tilts back and forth between secular whimsy and religious inspiration.

Eventually an assemblage of children joins Andy on stage by the Christmas tree to add their voices to the joyful noise. They are groomed to perfection in their holiday attire; you can almost smell the shampoo. Now and then the spotlights sweep across the audience, which looks eerily like the Republican National Convention of August ’08, and I’m trying to guess when this thing was made. If memory serves, the variety show Christmas special seems to have achieved the height of its popularity in the ’60s and ’70s, but this one could be as recent as the early 1980s, judging by the bigness of the hair and the post-disco, early Reagan-era bling. A possible clue: The four Osmonds report having sired a combined total of 45 sons and daughters at this point. Maybe we can roughly date it from there.