Aren't You Glad You're You?

Started off a sunny, breezy, warmer day with Pear Pancakes with Cranberry-Pear Compote (cranberries boiled in white grape-pear juice until they're practically jelly). As I ate, I dubbed The Bells of St. Mary's. A sequel to the Oscar-winning Going My Way, I ended up enjoying this more than the original film. Maybe it helps that Bing has the equally good Ingrid Bergman to bounce psalms and witticisms off of this time.

Father O'Malley (Crosby) now finds himself in the church of the title, the head of its order of nuns and Catholic school. O'Malley clashes with by-the-book Sister Benedict (Bergman) over how to run the school. Meanwhile, the old man building the skyscraper next door (Henry Travers of It's a Wonderful Life) wants to knock down St. Mary's to build a parking lot, but the school's newest charge, the daughter of a struggling single mother, may not have anywhere else to go...

As much as I liked Crosby here, Bergman comes off best as the strong-willed woman of the cloth who learns to let her habit down every once in a while and play baseball with the kids. Her teaching one of the boys who has been picked on to box was hilarious.

But my favorite part had nothing to do with Bergman or Crosby. St. Mary's first-grade Christmas pageant was utterly adorable...and fairly realistic with kids that age, from what I've witnessed with my younger cousins.

Put in a quick call to Mom while the movie ran. She had things to do before the Eagles game and couldn't talk for long. Apparently, my sister Anny had a tooth painfully removed last week. They were going to take her out to dinner and buy her an ice cream cake to make up for her not being able to eat on her birthday. Mom was thrilled to hear I now had some direction in mind for my life and had some goals to work toward.

Ran a short, lesser-known Rankin-Bass holiday special as I prepared to head to work. The Leprechaun's Christmas Gold is the only special I've ever seen that mixes Christmas lore with tales of Irish mythology. A young sailor gets quite a surprise when he pulls ashore on a remote island just off of Ireland to cut down a tree for Christmas. The tree has been holding a banshee prisoner. If she doesn't get the gold that belongs to the leprechauns who live on the island before Christmas morning, she'll turn into nothing but tears! She does her best to convince the wee people, and then the young sailor, to give up the precious metal.

Work was very busy all night. I was surprised, given this was the first Eagles game during the day since before Halloween. Maybe they were avoiding the game - the Eagles lost to the Cardinals 21-17. There were no really major problems, and I was in and out.

When I got home, I made chicken cutlets sauteed in wine sauce and leftover curried cauliflower for dinner and dubbed A Christmas Story and the original Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas with the narration by Kermit the Frog that was later cut on home video and DVD. The latter is my family's copy; we taped it off of HBO in 1988, shortly before A Disney Channel Christmas (which is why they're on the same tape).

A Christmas Story, for the two of you who haven't seen the 24-hour marathons of this film on cable, is all about the attempts by a 9-year-old by in 1940 Indiana to convince his mother to buy him a BB gun for Christmas. Trouble is, Mom thinks it's a bad idea, his dad may be too busy yelling at the furnace and the neighbors' dogs to notice, and he may not even survive childhood pitfalls like bullies, kids' shows that turn out to be commercials, and blurting out blue language in front of parents long enough to make it to Christmas Day!

Good ol' Ralphie. I've met few people who can't identify with something in this film. Yes, I too dealt with bullies, kids' shows that were really barely-disguised commercials, getting in trouble for accidentally cursing in front of parents, Dad's negotiation on the Christmas tree, annoying siblings, and begging for a special Christmas present. (Mom and Dad should be very happy that the closest my brother Keefe came to Ralphie's request was asking for power tools.)

Emmett Otter is far quieter. Based after the book by Lillian and Russell Hoban, this lovely Muppet cable special is one of the first they did with more realistic animals. Emmett and his Ma face a bare Christmas, until the near-by town announces a talent show on Christmas Eve. Both give up something they prize in order to join the contest. The winner of the contest turns out to be a surprise...and how Ma and Emmett finally have a happy holiday is even more so.

This is one of the sweetest holiday specials ever made. Paul Williams' music is absolutely gorgeous, including the touching ballads "When the River Meets the Sea" and "In Our World" and the hoe-down number for the Jug Band, "Barbecue."

I'm now dubbing another odd Christmas offering, the 1986 Babes In Toyland with Drew Barrymore as the child who doesn't believe in fantasy and Keanu Reeves as one of the citizens of the title world. I'm not exactly sure what anyone was thinking with this odd TV musical. No one can sing, the production looks cheap, Reeves is very out-of-place, and Leslie Bricusse's music is awful. It does have some really cute camp elements, though, including a scene-chewing Richard Mulligan as the villain Barnaby and Eileen Brennan as dithery Old Mother Hubbard. (This isn't currently on DVD, though Amazon.com has it for download.)