Elmo's Christmas Countdown "Countdown/I Hate Christmas"

My wife asked my 2 year old son if he wanted to write a letter to Santa.  His big sister had already done one, and he feels left out if you don't invite him to do whatever she does.

"I'll start," my wife told him.  "'Dear Santa . . .' Okay, now what do you want to tell him?"

"I hate Christmas!"

!!!!!!!!!!

Both my wife and I did a double take on this one.  Hate Christmas?  A 2 year old?

Then it clicked, and we kinda cracked up.

Of aaaallllll the Christmas specials my kids have viewed, their favorite is something I'd never heard of, prior to receiving it.  It's called "Elmo's Christmas Countdown."

I can't say that I've ever seen it on TV.  Or heard another person mention it.  But we've got it memorized in our house.

It stars the voice of Ben Stiller as Stiller The Elf and is chock full of mid-2000s stars (Ty Pennington!  Kevin James!) and mid-2000s references ("Heckuva Job, Brownie" and the Sopranos famous "fade to black" moment) and a slew of great songs from Sheryl Crow and Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Hudson.

And there are plenty of repeatable, Christmas-y quotables from the show, including:

"Elmo is making a Christmas Wish on a Christmas Star for a Christmas miracle!"  and "It's like Alicia Keys said, 'When things are at their darkest, that when you have to believe the most!"

But for whatever reason, my son latched on to the song sung by Stiller The Elf and Oscar The Grouch.

It's a classic back and forth style argument song, where Stiller tries to convince Oscar that he should be the one to "Count-down-Christmas" but Oscar sings back, using the same melody, "I-Hate-Christmas."

So that's where he got it from, and we think it's cute and it's silly and hopefully he won't repeat it outside the home, because if he did, that would be, to borrow a phrase from Oscar, a "pain in the King Wenceslas."



Hear the song on Youtube.

Stephen Colbert "Another Christmas Song"

Usually around the first weekend in December we buy our Christmas tree.  We like to get it up on the earlier side, though it does become a little crusty by the time Santa actually arrives.

And bringing in the tree, means going down to the basement and hauling up the boxes of Christmas decorations.  Not only things to hang on the tree, but lights for the window, the manger scene, nutcrackers, snowglobes, a mechanical Bob Hope figurine that sings . . . and the box of Christmas DVDs.

When I was a kid, Christmas specials were an event.  You'd study the TV page that came with the Sunday paper, to see when "Charlie Brown Christmas" or "The Grinch" was going to be on.  You'd wait all day for 8pm.  And the tension would build when you'd see that old "Special Presentation" bumper, that let you know that regular programming had the night off---here comes a Christmas special.

And woe be unto you if you missed it.

If a Christmas special aired, and you weren't in front of the TV, then you missed it for the year.  It didn't repeat.  You didn't have it on Tivo.  There were no VCRs to have recorded it.  You missed your chance.

It made watching a Christmas special, an event.

Today is a different experience.

I brought that box of DVDs up from the basement 2 weeks ago.  Since then, I bet my kids have seen "The Grinch" five times already.  And "Frosty" and "Rudolph" and "Charlie Brown" and others.  Hell, it's possible that "Elmo's Christmas Countdown" has been screened daily around these parts.

My kids won't remember Christmas specials as an event.  They'll remember them as a season.

Nowhere is this more evident, than on the DVD in that box, that only I will watch.

Yeah, the kids aren't really into Stephen Colbert.  But I got his Christmas special on DVD and really get a kick out of it.

One of the most on-the-nose jabs at the holiday-special-trope is that at the end of the show, Colbert holds up a DVD copy of the show he is currently in the progress of creating, saying it's for sale and you can watch it again and again.

Of course, unlike the kids, I'll only watch it once this year, like last year.

But maybe that just makes me as old and as crusty as our Christmas tree will be by New Years . . .


Hear the song on Youtube.


See the CBS "Special Presentation" bumper on Youtube.