It's Christmastime at the nuclear plant, and Homer's forgotten the gift exchange. He has an unexpected windfall, though, and spends most of the money on himself, since he MUST have a talking astrolabe. Marge calls him out on his selfishness, and makes him sleep on the couch, so he's up late and able to watch "Mr. McGrew's Christmas Carol." He's totally converted by McGrew's story (he isn't aware the story predates the little blind man in the cartoon), and wants to be the most generous man in town. Homer and Ned compete to be most generous, until Lisa points out that material possessions aren't the most important thing in the world, and most people in Springfield already have too much stuff.
So Homer, in an attempt to be the best Christmas giver of all time, decides to give people the gift of nothing for Christmas, and outgrinches his previous Grinch impressions. He's collected all the gifts in the town and is about to burn them, when an angry mob approaches. They're finally calmed by a miraculous star (poor Hans Moleman only had the one emergency flare, and to have it mistaken for God's healing touch isn't good news for him), and Ned reads us a bit of scripture.
Finally, Homer sums up his Christmas beliefs of peace and goodwill: "Let's just say that on this day, a million years ago, a dude was born who most of us think was magic, but others don't and that's cool. But we're probably right. Amen." This isn't quite Linus Van Pelt reading us the Gospel of Luke, but Homer's words aren't important. What matters is Homer had another in a long line of well-intentioned, soulful breakthroughs and tried really really hard to be a good person. In his attempts to be good, he started from a place of selfish materialism, moved to generous materialism, and through generous anti-materialism, before landing on his final middle-ground of mostly selfless, if questionable, faith. (I feel the need for a disclaimer here: Christianity is not a questionable faith, as faiths go. Homer is just not a very faithful or thoughful person, and his words get most of the good things about Christmas wrong.) We can all be selfish and materialist, and December is the one time of year we are guaranteed to be reminded that both those positions are traps that endanger our emotional well-being.
This is a VERY good Christmas Simpsons indeed, and I think it's a combination of the heartfelt message of self-improvement and generosity with the constant parodies. There are parodies of six specific Christmas specials embedded in the text of this episode, which makes it closer to an episode of The Critic than classic Simpsons. I love The Critic, and wish they'd done a Christmas episode ("The Nightmare Before Hannukah" is a great, funny clip, but not nearly long enough) .
As a Simpsons episode, I rate this 9/10. A lot of people will tell you the series started going downhill very early, and I haven't seen a lot of the rest of this season, but this specific episode is funny and character-driven and earns its emotion and sentiment.
As a Christmas show, I rate this 10/10. It's Simpson-ized, but practically every second of this is about Christmas, and its heart and brain are both in the right place.
No comments:
Post a Comment