Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Happy Days of Christmas!

As you probably know, I love Christmas. I love the music, the decorations, the pageants, the get-togethers, and yes, all kinds of Christmas movies and TV specials. Over the past couple years, I've written about some of my favorites - everything from The Grinch to Ernest Saves Christmas - because the Advent and Christmas season is just one of my favorite times of the year!

A quiet Christmas with the Cunningham family
(including the older brother, Chuck!)
Recently, I rediscovered the first Christmas episode from the classic TV show, Happy Days (from Season 2), and it made a huge impression on me. In the episode, Ritchie's father, Howard, wants nothing more than for his family to have a nice, quiet Christmas together. He wants them to take part in all the classic family traditions, and most importantly, he wants their celebration to be family-only. After all, this, Howard later says, is "the whole point of Christmas Eve"!

And I would imagine that for many families, this is exactly what they believe - that Christmas is about families spending time together and having a nice dinner and trimming the tree and reading "Twas the Night Before Christmas" together, and showing their love for one another by buying each other as many presents as they can afford - or as many as they can get on credit!

But then there's Fonzie...