More Christmas Moments

Last year I wrote a post focussing on the Christmassiest elements of the years I'd written about for These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things. Here's an update based on what I've written about since:

Christmas 1988 and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol inspired both Scrooged in cinemas and Blackadder's Christmas Carol on television. Both revolve around a character who isn't Ebeneezer Scrooge that learn the true meaning of Christmas after seeing visions of the past, present and future. Each man finds a very different "true meaning of Christmas" though.

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1989 and 1990 saw the publication of the Red Dwarf novels, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life respectively and one story element across both books is Lister getting back to Earth, discovering that Bedford Falls, the town from It's A Wonderful Life, is real, moving there, starting a family with his ideal woman and all on Christmas Eve, because in Bedford Falls it's always Christmas Eve...

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Christmas 1991 is the first for a Northern Exposure's Joel Fleischman and the experience gives the good Jewish boy a crisis of confidence in Seoul Mates, while the local Native Americans are decorating everything with Ravens. To quote Chris-in-the-Morning: "Twinkling colored lights are nice and so are plastic Santas and reindeers and nativity scenes, but let me tell you something. There's nothing like the sight of a beautiful, black-as-pitch raven to get you in the Christmas spirit."

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Four years later and Alan Partridge celebrates Christmas 1995 with a Christmas edition of his show entitled Knowing Me, Knowing Yule With Alan Partridge. Alan gamely soldiers on through struggles with a tranvestite celebrity chef, product placement, racist chauffers and his own boss as a guest toward the most predictable of puns.

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1996 saw Terry Pratchett take his Discworld into a Christmas-like territory with Hogfather and Father Ted broadcast A Christmassy Ted, which at some point I will stop going on about.

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The radio series of On The Town With The League Of Gentlemen marked Christmas in 1997 with God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (not to be confused with this), as the residents of Spent celebrated with a Christmas party that draws the radio show to a spectacular close.

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1998
Amends is a beautiful episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which sees the Slayer and her vampire ex-boyfriend dreaming the same dreams, Xander's Christmas tradition, an uncharacteristic snowfall in California and sets up the Big Bad for the series final season, while Louis Theroux's Weird Christmas reunites him with four of his Weird Weedenders to talk about porn, survivalism, Christ, aliens and Satan Claus.

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Christmases 1999 to 2010 featured in last years post.

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Last year saw the broadcast of not one but two very different Doctor Who Christmas episodes The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe on TV and Hornet's Nest on the radio. Both were fantastic.

Here's to Christmas 2012...