{"id":10812,"date":"2007-12-20T18:10:46","date_gmt":"2007-12-20T23:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/20\/10812.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:45","slug":"also-its-a-wonderful-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/12\/20\/also-its-a-wonderful-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Also, It&#8217;s a Wonderful Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger used to watch a lot of Christmas Specials on television, but I kicked that habit (and kicked the television-watching habit generally) and haven&#8217;t seen very many in recent years. I understand that there are now half-a-dozen new ones a year, for various channels. I&#8217;m wondering if they still follow the same pattern:<br \/>\n<ul><li>There is a threat to the Christmas celebration of a fairly large number of people, ranging from a part of town to the entire world.<\/li><br \/>\n<li>There is a child, who is either ill, homeless or bereaved.<\/li><br \/>\n<li>There is someone who does not have the Christmas Spirit. That person is often a banker, but could be anyone in a position of authority: a corporate executive, a store owner, or the personification of a supernatural force, or even royalty.<\/li><br \/>\n<li>The Person without Christmas Spirit has an associate or assistant who does, secretly, have the Christmas spirit, but is for most of the plot sufficiently cowed to acquiesce in the PwCS&#8217;s plans.<\/li><br \/>\n<li>In the end, the PwCS takes the Christmas Spirit into his (or her) heart, and learns to keep Christmas in his (or her) heart all the year round.<\/li><br \/>\n<li>The child does celebrate Christmas, with more material plenty than ever before.<\/li><\/ul><br \/>\n<p>It&#8217;s a syndrome, not a disease. I mean, that there&#8217;s a set of symptoms, and if the show has, say, four out of the six symptoms, then it&#8217;s got Christmas Special Syndrome, whether it has the other two or not. And of course not all Christmas Specials have the Syndrome, and not all the ones that do have the Syndrome are the worse for it. YHB&#8217;s absolute favorite Christmas Specials are <i>How the Grinch Stole Christmas<\/i> (the original animated special, of course), which is clearly Syndromic, <i>A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/i>, which is not, and the <i>Vicar of Dibley<\/i> Christmas episode from the third series, which is also not. At all. Also, <I>The Christmas Carol<\/i> is Syndromic, I think, as is <I>The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe<\/i>, if you stretch a point.<br \/>\n<p>So, Gentle Readers, what are your favorites, and do they have the Syndrome? And have I forgotten some symptoms?<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger is careful not to bring wild charges of anti-Semitism into the discussion of moneylenders who lack the Christmas Spirit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flim"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18201,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10812\/revisions\/18201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}