Each year Christmas comes. Trees are trimmed, carols are sung, and each year I write up a short, sweet Christmas list asking for peace and goodwill across the world – and for Gary Busey to rework his jaw-dropping direct-to-video release “The Ginger-Dead Man” into a Broadway musical. Each year I am left hanging.
But that's not to say I've soured on Christmas; no, you won't catch me just asking for a couple good books and a new set of pajamas and calling it a season. In fact, now that baby Owen is on the scene, I'm probably more determined to play Christmas up big this year, too.
Trouble is, I'm having trouble separating out my Christmas memories from my regular memories, which are mostly from TV shows. My chief memory of holidays gone by may actually be a flashback to an episode of Battle of the Network Stars.
If you don't remember the show, Battle was an annual event where the TV networks pitted their top stars into actual athletic competition against each other. If you wanted to see Ron Howard or Billy Crystal don giant headbands and run obstacle courses, this was your chance. Actually, athletic prowess may not have quite been the point – I didn't pick up on it at the time, but they sure did show a lot of slow-motion replays when Lynda “Wonder Woman” Carter and the cast of Charlie's Angels were in the pool or doing gymnastics. But for me, it was all about the sports – and if nothing else, I couldn't pass up the chance to hear Howard Cosell, dean of sports commentators, utter great sentences like “Gabe Kaplan of Welcome Back Kotter throwing a perfect spiral to Mark Harmon, who has dominated the football competition thus far.”
These memories are now inexplicably and intextricably linked to visions of tree trimming, caroling and stockings full of toys and goodies. “Battle of the Christmas Stars” begins with a winner-take-all duke-a-roo between the bird factions of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The three French hens quickly overpower the partridge in a pear tree, but lose in the finals to the two turtle doves in what Cosell and co-host Frank Gifford dub a major holiday upset.
And then there's the Winter Wonderland Overland Race. The premise is something like this: Rudolph and the other reindeer have stolen the hula hoop coveted by Alvin and the Chipmunks. To get it back, the high-pitched cartoon rodents have to run a gauntlet of A-list actors, all armed to the teeth. Ricardo Montalban and Cheryl Ladd throwing poison darts at chipmunks – this is what Christmas apparently means to me now.
Finally, there's the big Present-Giving event, in which the symbols of Christmas in each country take each other on for bragging rights. Santa Claus is there, obviously, and the man with the bag is a heavy favorite, but there's a strong challenge coming from Sweden. Tomte the rhyming holiday gnome jumps out to an early lead when he delivers a copy of Stephen King's The Stand to Who's the Boss? star Tony Danza, but then Santa delivers a gymnastics outfit to none other than Farrah Fawcett. Cosell starts with the slow-motion replays again and the right jolly old elf is winner and still champion, though he apologizes later for taking the low road to victory.
Just for the record, I hope and pray none of this ever happens, except for the Tomte thing – I think Tony Danza would really like that King book. Do you think the Swedes would loan Tomte out for a few days if I send them Mark Harmon's autograph?
