There
are different kinds of Christmas stories.
It’s a Wonderful Life would seem to be the gold standard, in which a man
gets a special wish and comes to realize how important he is. There are angels and the spirit of good will
and everything.
There
are those like A Christmas Story, which was the one teachers showed on that
free day before Christmas Break. It kind
of got overplayed for me. There is a
slightly more commercial aspect, as Ralphie is on a mission to get his
gun. But you still have family and a
mall Santa. (“You'll shoot your eye out,
kid.”)
A
case could even be made for Die Hard.
It’s about a man who visits his family on Christmas and saves his wife
and her coworkers from terrorists. There
are naysayers who would tell you otherwise, but they’re wrong. Just wrong.
("Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho.")
Then,
there are the productions that just exist.
It’s as if someone did it just to make a Christmas movie or have a
Christmas episode for their TV series.
For The Twilight Zone, The Night of the Meek would be that episode. I don’t know if Rod Serling honestly thought
it was a good idea or if he was under pressure from the network, but there it
is.
Henry
Corwin is a department-store Santa. He’s
not a very good one at that. He comes in
so drunk that he’s not even fooling the children. Henry basically spends his Christmas Eve
doing two things: Getting drunk and
getting fired. All he wants is to make
kids happy. He wants kids to know actual
joy. He feels that he’d make a good
Santa, if only…
This
may be a weak episode, but it’s still The Twilight Zone. Henry finds a magical bag that allows him to
give people whatever they ask for. Henry
reaches into the bag and there it is.
Naturally,
this attracts the attention of the police, who assume he’s stealing from his
former employer. Rather than rebuke the
store manager, Henry gives him a bottle of cherry brandy, which Henry notes was
a good year.
In
the end, Henry doesn’t take a gift for himself.
To him, it was a joy to see the looks on everyone else’s faces. He ultimately gets his wish, finding a
reindeer-led sleigh and an elf. It looks
like the gift-giving gig has become permanent.
I
don’t think this episode is going to make it into my permanent Christmas
rotation. It wasn’t a great Twilight
Zone episode. Normally, we get some sort
of morality play. Greed catches up with
people. A person down on his luck comes
to realize what’s really important.
There’s a message. Here, it looks
like Serling was pressured into making the episode.
Speaking
of which, it doesn’t really work as a Christmas story, either. It’s just a man who eventually becomes
Santa. There’s no rhyme or reason except
that maybe he failed at everything else.
He finally has the job he wanted for himself all along.
