A Gen Y Christmas

A reader writes,

Brian,

My wife and I re-watched a handful of Christmas movies while wrapping presents for my side of the family last night. One section of our DVD library is just Christmas movies, most of which are now decades old, which I realize now is almost a physical manifestation of the Gen Y nostalgia you talk about. In any case, one of those was Jim Henson’s A Christmas Toy, which first aired on St Nicholas’ Day in 1986. While the main characters are toys, their owners are a brother and sister who seem to be about eight years old, which puts them right in the boundary zone between Gen X and Gen Y. The script doesn’t reference ages, but when I did some digging, I found that the actress was born in 1979 and her counterpart in 1980. My wife as born in ’74, while I was born in ’80, so those kids are in our own cohort, more or less.

As I was watching it last night, I realized how much these kids fit the Gen Y profile of a generation raised by and emotionally attached to their toys. They have an entire playroom full of toys. Both parents are still in the home, but they’re presented as busy and annoyed with the logistics of Christmas Eve, household chores, and children who don’t put their dirty clothes in the hamper to be washed, rather than loving parents celebrating a holiday with their children. (To be fair, I might also be annoyed about starting a load of laundry after dinner on Christmas Eve, or finding toys under foot in the hall.) The kids’ older teenage sister is a whiny voice which calls them ‘brats’ and ‘monsters.’ At this point, Mom enforces discipline by threatening to have the toys under tree taken “back where they came from:” Santa Claus. The whole tone of the family’s holiday is materialistic. The children’s sense that Christmas is about getting new toys sets the girl’s toys up to compete for her affection. In the end, she confesses her love for her new toy, and all the others. While this is supposed to be the heartwarming finish, there’s also something creepy to it. We never hear her say anything like that to her family.

The movie isn’t a total loss because the main character, Rugby, who suffers from vanity and pride, learns a lesson in humility. In its moral dimension, it’s almost more a movie about Lent than Christmas, because after Rugby loses his only friend – a cat toy named Mew whom he has spent most of the movie scorning and insulting – he goes to confess his faults and his affection to the body of his friend, who is lying frozen downstairs in a cat bed. Rugby has no reason to believe this act of confession will do any good, but does it anyway. Somehow, this act of confession revives Mew, as well as all the other frozen toys.

I thought this might be interesting to you as an example of Gen Y’s mindset about our toys and childhood from that era, before anyone realized we were being raised by our toys and televisions.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,
Andrew

Thank you, Andrew. The timing of this email was rather synchronicitous, since the day before I received it, I started reminiscing about this movie at random for the first time in decades.

It’s weird that I more or less forgot about it, since Toy Story ripped off its main conceit and plot pretty blatantly.

Of course, Disney now owns both Toy Story and the Muppets.

They did cut Kermit the Frog’s appearance as Santa from subsequent DVD releases of The Christmas Toy, though.

The materialism of these movies doesn’t hold a candle to the avarice of the companies that make them.

That’s the Gen Y coming-of-age experience in a nutshell: having the magic of childhood spoiled again and again by heartless megacorps as you age.

But like all evil, this too can be turned to good.

The 80s may have been the quintessential consumerist decade, but at least we still had a vestige of Christian culture.

Now we only have pathological consumerism.

But hard times are coming. The unparalleled prosperity of the West is slipping away and will be gone all too soon.

Westerners, especially members of Gen Y, should use this opportunity to wean themselves off our soul-crushing addiction to compulsive consumption.

Because it wasn’t how special the toys themselves were that resonated with us. It was the relationships with special people that gave them context.

Christmas gifts from parents we now only make one out-of-state call to a month.

Birthday presents from doting grandparents, many of them long gone.

Cartoon tie-in action figures we fought mock wars with at the homes of friends who moved away in junior high.

Those gifts had meaning because the people we enjoyed them with meant the world to us.

And the source of all meaning is the Logos, the Eternal Word of God.

He was there with us back then, working through those goods and those good people to invite us into deeper relationship with Him.

And He is the only One who will never abandon us, never leave us; never forget about us.

It’s His birthday in a few days.

Let’s take advantage of the occasion to listen close for the message of unconditional love He’s been trying to get through to us all our lives.

Of course, if you appreciate 80s cartoon style fighting robots, I wrote two novel series featuring them – and a foundationally Christian worldview.

Read it now: