25 Days of Christmas #14: "All Through the House"

Here is Homicide's first real Christmas episode: "All Through the House."

It's Christmastime in Baltimore, and the murder police are having a bleak time of it. Lewis's partner has recently committed suicide, and Russert can't shake the memory of her late husband. They go out together on Lewis's new case, since the victim, Whitney Freeman, was a witness in one of Russert's most important ongoing investigations. Felton's wrapping up presents for his kids, though his wife has left him and taken them he knows not where. Pembleton misses his wife. He misses his fire. He misses Nat King Cole.

Only one person really feels the Christmas spirit, and that's The Big Man himself, Stan Bolander. He's put up a tree, which prompts a rant from Munch about the relentless cheer of the season and the pressure to be happy. Soon, they get a call: someone's shot Santa. The dead Salvation Army Santa had his kettle stolen, and the neighbor lady says that Santa's house is right down the street. A kid answers the door, and Stan goes off to find social services to care for the kid, while Munch has to watch the kid and try to work up the courage to tell him of the murder.

They don't get along very well, and it's great fun to watch the kid calling Munch on his idiosyncrasy: "You've got a weird way of talking. ...You're using all these weird words. Like they were a cartoon coming from your mouth, and you're watching them thinking, 'I'm cool!' " 

"I get a lot of bodies.A lot of different backgrounds.This time of the year, I want every body to feel welcome."

Lewis and Russert go to notify their victim's mother. Mrs. Freeman is a socialite who's only focused on making sure her houseful of servants decorate the tree properly, until she breaks down with guilt over her daughter's drug problem and death. Back at the squadroom, Bayliss is trying to get a game of hearts going, but nobody will play with him. Until, that is, he convinces Gee to play a few hands, for a nominal wager.

Stan gets back to Munch and the kid, with great news: the Santa who got murdered wasn't anybody's dad. The victim had mugged the real Santa, the kid's father, for the contents of his kettle, and stolen his suit. Bolander is reassured by this Christmas miracle, and Munch, who hadn't quite gotten around to notifying the kid, is relieved, though he can't quite see the hand of God or miracle of Christmas in the night's events.

Lewis and Russert roust the assistant state's attorney, Ed Danvers (played by bigtime TV star Željko Ivanek), out of his home and warm cider and red holiday sweater, to find the file on their case.  Their clues finally lead back to the wife of the criminal Whitney Freeman was about to testify against -- she did it so their kids could have their own father back.

Bayliss and Gee's card game has expanded, and become a lot more expensive, as Gee ends up shooting the moon. You see, Gee put one of his daughters through college playing hearts, and as he tells Bayliss, one should never try to hustle a Sicilian. (I always said this was the funniest serious show on TV during its run, and this episode is a pretty good example, between Gee's hustle and Munch's sparring with Santa's kid.)

The squad's night ends, and they all go outside to find more fresh snow falling. An impromptu snowball fight erupts, and everyone shouts "Merry Christmas!" to each other, and to us.

As an episode of Homicide, I rate this 8/10. The relative lightness of the storylines in this episode doesn't trump the truthfulness of the series' tone as a whole. Our next Christmas episode will be more characteristic in tone.
As a Christmas show, I rate this 9/10. A lot of dark shows have a hard time balancing a lighter tone in their Christmas episodes, but this one is almost perfect. Sure, it's about murder police, but no innocent person loses their life in this episode, and it's got a lot of heart and warmth and snow and Christmas music over the end.

Homicide: Life on the Street - The Complete Series

25 Days of Christmas #13: "Night of the Dead Living"

Hoo boy, am I behind! I'll try to write up all three Christmas Homicides today. Here's the first one, my favorite Homicide of all time: "Night of the Dead Living."

Let's start off on the right foot: this isn't technically a Christmas episode. In fact, it's the hottest night of the year, September in Baltimore. The A/C in the squadroom is broken, of course, and Lt. Al Giardello is trying to get it fixed, to no avail.

There's a mysterious candle, which is lit every night by... someone, we know not who. The night is punishingly slow, and no calls are coming in, so Felton and Lewis appoint themselves to investigate who might be lighting it.

Well, it's not fair to say the phone isn't ringing. There might not be any new homicides to solve, but a man dressed as Santa Claus is on a roof, threatening to jump. And he has a gun. Detective Howard (big-deal movie star Melissa Leo) is handling the calls about Santa and calls from her sister.

"I liked him when I first met him ... I was just showing him my gun."

Crosetti's family is on the phone, too -- his teenaged daughter and her boyfriend want to spend the night together, and his ex-wife is going to let them. Felton's wife calls too -- they're still together, kind of, but it's rough going.

Speaking of rough going, John Munch and his girlfriend have broken up. More specifically, she's broken up with him, and he goes off on a patented Munch speed-rant about relationships in general and her in particular. Bolander, meanwhile, is trying to decide if he wants to try dating again. This just sets Munch off even further. Finally, Santa is rounded up (he shot the gun into the crowd in an attempt to hit his wife, though it should be pointed out it was just a watergun), and as he's brought in, he and Munch have a chat:

MUNCH: So what is it, Kringle? One of the elves kiss Mrs Claus's mistletoe? Ozone layer thin over the North Pole? Is Rudolph's nose red 'cause of alcohol?
SANTA: People don't know how to give any more.
MUNCH: I understand. On December 24th, you're the most popular guy in the world. On December 26th, you're just another fat man in a bad suit. Happy Hanukkah.

Gee goes down to the basement to turn on the air hisownself, and discovers a baby in a cage. As they wait for social services to come pick up the baby, most of the detectives coo and attempt to make him comfortable in the hot, hard-edged squadroom. Turns out the baby belongs to the beautiful janitorial lady who's filling in that night, and her finances don't stretch to hiring babysitters. Santa escapes, but they think he's still in the building somewhere.

Bayliss is still chin-deep in the Adena Watson investigation, and he's found a new clue: fingerprints on her library book, which lead him to ... a 12-year old kid, who'd checked the book out years prior. (Much like the episode as a whole, this plot-point comes from David Simon's nonfiction book about the BPD Homicide division: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.) Pembleton, who's been drinking hot tea comfortably while everyone else sweats, chastises Bayliss for his flaws, most notably his inability to understand the criminal mind.

Then, Santa crashes down through the ceiling, inspiring Bayliss to have a breakthrough about Adena: the placement of her body makes no sense, except from above. Only the fire escape leads there easily. He starts to follow up on leads, and we finally learn that the self-same John Munch is the one who lights the candle each night, in memoriam of all those who have been killed. Gee invites the squad up to the roof, and they share a brief moment of camaraderie and hilarious joy.

As an episode of Homicide, I rate this 10/10. It's an atypical episode, granted, but we get to just hang out with all the characters and hear what they think about... everything. This show always lets us see the detectives' personal lives, and this episode is almost nothing but that. On the rare occasions I've evangelized about this show to someone, I'd pick this and "Three Men and Adena" to sum up the greatness of the series.
As a Christmas episode, I rate this 6/10. It's September, and hot, and there aren't any gifts or songs, but to quote the show: "Santa Claus, mystery babies: it feels like Christmas." When Santa falls through the ceiling, there's even a flurry of white insulation that comes with him.

I must apologize: the single-season sets of Homicide are apparently now out-of-print, so this buy link goes to the whole thing:

Homicide: Life on the Street - The Complete Series

25 Days of Christmas #12: MST3K "Santa Claus"

So here's the second Christmas Mystery Science Theater: a 1959 Mexican film entitled Santa Claus.

Santa lives in his enormous workshop on a cloud high above the North Pole, with dozens of international children (who make all the toys) and his wondrous array of surveillance gadgets, made for him by Merlin. Yes, that Merlin. It's nearly Christmas, so it's time for Santa to finish setting up his nativity scene and sing a song urging his child laborers to finish that year's toy manufacturing. Then, evil rears its ugly head...

Satan really doesn't want Santa to succeed, so he sends Pitch, one of his lesser demons, to defeat Santa. Pitch tries to get our adorable little heroine, Lupita, to steal her only Christmas desire, a beautiful dolly, as Santa watches and listens helplessly (he can spy on us all the time, but only visit in person on the night of the 24th),

Santa and the narrator urge Lupita to resist Pitch's wheedling, and she repeatedly tells Pitch that stealing is bad and she wants to be good. And then it's the night of the 24th, and Santa has to wind up his clockwork magic reindeer:

Good, old-fashioned, nightmare fuel.

And we, the audience, are scarred for life. And that's only the first half of the film: After that, Santa and Pitch have several weird slapstick fights and Santa helps another good child, a poor little rich boy who only wants his parents to love him (Santa doses their drinks with a magical remembering potion). Pitch cuts a hole in Santa's bag of magical sleeping powders, and Santa loses his invisibility rose, and gets treed by a dog. Did I mention that Santa and Pitch have weird slapstick fights? Because they do. A lot. This is truly strange, and inexplicable. And, like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, I can't imagine any Hollywood studio would make anything this damned weird.

The previous MST Christmas episode was a Joel-era one, and this is only about the tenth episode Mike hosted. The writing is, at this point, indistinguishable from the earlier part of this season, and Mike's in-theater riffing is already perfectly in-character and has a great flow. I watch both these Christmas episodes almost every December, and I think I've seen them more than any other MST3K, even Manos and Pod People and Mitchell. The two episodes, I noticed this week, do a few similar things in each:

1) Frank and Clay re-enact "Gift of the Magi."
2) In the riffs, Santa has Vietnam flashbacks.
3) A bot makes reference to "Carmen Miranda rights."
4) They make a reference to The Dick Van Dyke Show.
5) "Diarrhea is like a storm raging inside you."

If you care to read more about the riffs, there's an incomplete roundup here.

Coming up next, I have three Christmas-related episodes of Homicide: Life On The Street...

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santa Claus   Mystery Science Theater 3000: XVI

25 Days of Christmas #11: MST3K "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians"

Here's one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes: "Santa Claus Conquers The Martians."

First off, a bit about this movie: it's weird. It's weird, and goofy, and seems like someone pulled two kids' movies out of a hat and mixed them up together. There's about ten dry, sad minutes on Mars, where the kids never laugh and the nearly-dead oracle proclaims "We need a Santa Claus on Mars." So, naturally, the King of Mars decides to come to Earth and kidnap Santa.

And they do it too, and kidnap two all-American Earth kids in the bargain. Along the way, the kids encounter an unconvincing polar bear, and the Martians' cardboard-box robot. Santa turns the robot into a giant toy with unexplained magic, but once the Martians use their freezey-guns on a few elves and Mrs. Claus, Santa goes along with them.

On the trip back to Mars, the evil Martian underling tries to eject Santa and the kids into space, only for Santa to escape using his chimney skills. The Earth kids meet the depressed Martian kids, who have to eat pills for dinner and learn all their lessons in a sleep-pyramid... I think. Santa cheers up the Martian kids, and recruits the film's annoying comic relief to be the Martian Santa.

This is a truly strange movie, in the way that no studio-released film could be -- nothing in this film was focus-grouped or done by committee, and in a weird way I respect that kind of integrity. On the other hand, it's pretty bad, so there's that. This isn't even the weirdest Christmas movie made. We'll be looking at that in the next Christmas MST3K...

This is from the third season of MST3K, by which point the show was going full-bore, and this episode just cracks along. The joke/minute ratio is really high, and most of them land well. (I also feel like the percentage of then-topical jokes which haven't survived the ensuing decades are fewer than usual.) If you'd care to read annotations for all the jokes, please feel free to do so here. I feel like the host segments, as usual, are hit-or-miss; my favorite one is Tom's soulful take on A Child's Christmas in Wales which quickly descends into screaming worry about Santa exploding in the vaccuum of space.

This is the only MST3K film which has been redone by both Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic. I've seen the CT version (once, a while ago) but not the Rifftrax version. Maybe next Christmas, instead of this MST version I've seen so often, I'll watch those two back-to-back. While the film proper is public domain, this episode is currently out-of-print, so the buy link below is a little pricey. But, for that price, you also get Manos: Hands of Fate, so it's all relative. OR, a quick websearch will just take you to the full video online, and you can watch for free. Your choice.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection - The Essentials (Manos, the Hands of Fate / Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)

25 Days of Christmas #10b: "Christmas Attack Zone"

It's the final Christmas 30 Rock: "Christmas Attack Zone."

Tracy's gotten an award nomination for his seriously depressing (and depressingly serious) drama, Hard To Watch, and trying to be serious all the time is hard for him. He's presenting the film at a special Christmastime charity screening, in a women's shelter.  Kenneth points out that making people laugh is really important, too. Why, Kenneth wonders, wouldn't Tracy let the studio release his sequel to The Chunks?

Meanwhile, Jack's mother is visiting for Christmas, and she's sure to disapprove of his impending (unmarried) fatherhood, and his fiancee to boot. He goes on the offensive and invites his father, Colleen's shameful sex secret, to come too; maybe this year he can come out on top. Liz points out what a bad idea this all is, as she's only attending the dinner to avoid her own family's drama.

Of course, in the long run, all he gets is everyone mad at him. And, for the first time in his 50 years, both his mother and father are yelling at him. He loves it; who knew?!

As soon as Tracy gets to the shelter, he realizes Kenneth was right: these women and children don't need more depressing stories. They just want to laugh at Tracy, in various and assorted fat suits, falling down stairs and hose-vomiting in his suppressed movie The Chunks 2.(Embarrassing admission here: I've never seen Sullivan's Travels, but even I know this is the reference here.)

Meanwhile, Jenna's not coping well with her breakup from Paul, the Jenna Maroney impersonator she's been dating recently. Nobody else really understood Jenna like Paul (their sweetly twisted relationship was always hilarious and touching). It hits Jenna especially hard at Christmas, because there's a celebrity New Year's Eve party, and they could have had the best couple costume ever. They visit briefly, and it turns out they had the same idea, so they go ahead and put the plan into action:

"You dress as Natalie Portman from the movie Black Swan and I dress as former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Lynn Swann! We're two black swans!"

Jenna and Paul sing our final Christmas 30 Rock duet over a montage of Liz riding a bus home to suffer with her own family for a change, of Jack's parents berating him, of underprivileged women and children laughing and laughing and laughing at Tracy's movie. Christmas episodes usually have a sentimental ending; this is the weirdest, creepiest ending for a touching show I've ever seen.

As an episode of 30 Rock, I rate this 7/10: the main players and guest stars get almost all the screentime, but I'd love to see the writer's room and show staff too. They don't even put on a show this week.
As a Christmas episode, I rate this 6/10. The sentimental theory of the ending is stronger than the actual sentiment achieved, in my book.

Christmas Attack Zone  30 Rock: Season 5

25 Days of Christmas #10a: "Secret Santa"

Hey, it's my favorite 30 Rock Christmas episode. It's "Secret Santa"!

Kenneth is once again doing his Secret Santa gift-exchanging game (I love the scene where he explains the rules, calling back to last Christmas's game of "murder"), and Frank, Toofer, and Lutz are about to be roped in. Thinking on their feet, they invent their own new religion, Verdukianism, which precludes their involvement in Kenneth's game. They make up ridiculous rules and demands, and Tracy calls them on it. (Since when is Tracy Jordan the moral center of any story?) Kenneth is so upset at the idea that men can just invent religion that he loses, for the first time ever, his Christmas spirit.

Meanwhile, Jack's high school crush, Nancy Donovan, is in town, and they reconnect quickly, considering she's still still sorta married. And, at the same time, Liz is desperately trying to find Jack an appropriate Christmas gift. After she makes an expensive goof, Jack suggests they should instead give each other no-cost gifts. Liz makes a living being creative, so that should be right up her alley, right? Well...

Oh, and Pete has a story in this Christmas episode too. Jenna never chips in for the janitorial staff's gift, and he's upset about it. When he hears Danny, the new cast member, sing ("New dude is as good at singing as Tracy Jordan is at everything!"), he immediately drafts him to take over Jenna's traditional Christmas solo. Jenna... doesn't take it well.

In the end, Danny botches the song to mend Jenna's feelings, and Jack gives Liz a memento of her ridiculous school play, and also a date with Larry Wilcox, from CHIPS. Liz's gift to Jack is a terrorist threat which:
A) Strands Nancy in New York an extra day, so she and Jack can share a kiss, and
B) Gets the Verdukian writers arrested and/or tazed in front of Kenneth, restoring his faith in his angry, vengeful God.

The Simpsons is a show wherein God takes part in human affairs a LOT -- usually to punish someone, and that someone's usually Homer. 30 Rock isn't often a show where events show the hand of God, but in this episode, good intentions lead to good rewards, and bad intentions lead to punishment. Even though Liz does a terrible thing for Jack's gift, her intentions were pure, and her punishment goes to the selfish writers. Pete's insistence on Christmas vengeance not only backfires, but (if he still cares) it makes his decision to let Danny sing on-air look foolish.

As an episode of 30 Rock, I rate this 9/10. Every cast member has something to do in this episode, all the stories are well-connected, and the jokes are spot-on. Plus, they produce a show that week!
As a Christmas show, I rate this 10/10. Generosity is rewarded, selfishness is punished, and Kenneth gets to keep his faith. There's a loving duet sung, and music is important in Christmas episodes.

Secret Santa  30 Rock: Season 4

25 Days of Christmas #9b: "Christmas Special"

This is the second Christmas episode of 30 Rock: "Christmas Special."

Everybody has Christmas plans, and they all go wrong: Liz's family cancels on the 22nd, and Jack's attempt to ditch his mother for nude-tanning and monkey-wrestling goes awry when he backs into her with his car. She's holed up in his apartment, and he can't take the closeness, so he orders the TGS staff to write and produce a big Christmas special in 48 hours. In an attempt to feel some familial love, Liz donates much too much to a Christmas charity, only to suspect she's been scammed (or, as Tracy would have it, "scrumped"). Her attempts to shut down the entire charity program don't go well.

"Dr. Williams said 'boundaries.'"

The staff are struggling with Jack's unreasonable demands, and Liz's grouchy complaints. Why, only Kenneth still feels the spirit of Christmas, and Liz takes him to see just how badly she was scrumped. It turns out that Kenneth was right -- children DID get the gifts from Liz, though she ends up stealing their faith in Santa in the vain hope of a hug.

Jenna, after expressing regret over not seeing the New Kids on the Block with her entourage, really gets into the spirit of singing her Christmas solo, along with her accompanist, Alonzo (seen here, played by Jeff Richmond, the show's composer and Tina Fey's husband, who's in three of the four 30 Rock Christmas episodes).

Jack continues to complain about Colleen's unreasonable behavior at Christmas, always inviting over her gentleman friend, Mr. Schwartz, and putting the moves on him with Jack in the room. Liz helps Jack to realize that the Donaghy family was very poor, and Mr. Schwartz's initials were FAO, and Colleen was just ensuring the kids had toys for Christmas.

So Jack's anger at his mother evaporates, and Jenna's solo turns into a fantasy singalong between Jack and Colleen, bringing the two of them together once again at Christmas.

As an episode of 30 Rock, I rate this 8.5/10 -- the one-liners are fast and thick here, and the twisty emotions of the characters are fun to follow. Bonus: they work on producing a show in this episode!
As a Christmas show, I rate this 9/10 -- charity, faith, love, family, and a heartwarming singalong are all I ask.

Christmas Special  30 Rock: Season 3

25 Days of Christmas #9a: "Ludachristmas"

Here is the first Christmas episode of 30 Rock: "Ludachristmas."

Liz's family is coming to New York for a holiday visit, complete with skating at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and a festive dinner, and they end up nearly adopting her boss. Jack originally doubts their goodheartedness, but is completely won over just in time for his mom's visit. Colleen Donaghy, of course, doesn't have much Christmas spirit, or milk of human kindness for that matter, and declares she'll rip off the Lemon family's loving veneer. Liz's brother Mitch, due to a freak skiing accident, believes it's still 1985, so Andy Richter gets to play an awkward teenager in a 40-year-old body, which seems to be a role he was born for.

"That's a filthy Christmas miracle."

In the meantime, the TGS staff has roundly rejected their awful gift from the GE Corporation (the world's worst designed photoscanner/papershredder -- the toggle switch reads "PS -- PS"). Kenneth feels they have misunderstood the spirit of Christmas, so with his creepy pastor he kidnaps them and forces them to learn the "true meaning of Christmas."

Tracy Jordan, meanwhile, is wearing an ankle bracelet which monitors his blood-alcohol level, after a DUI incident. In 2007, this was a sneaky nod to Tracy Morgan's own bad-driving past, but this year is a horrible reminder that, walking or no, reckless driving is dangerous and not very funny. (This shot is a freeze-frame joke I noticed for the first time this week: note the other devices being tracked, including the patented 30 Rock Star Wars reference.)

In the long run, after Pastor Gary's seemingly endless religious messages ("It was sung to the tune of American Pie, but it was so much longer!"), Tracy inspires the staff, in the nonmaterialistic spirit of the holiday, to chop down the giant tree outside. And then his ankle bracelet goes off -- he's been drinking -- and he points out he should probably never, ever be listened to or followed.

And Colleen has been poking and prodding all the obvious chinks in the Lemon family armor, until she finally hits on a non-obvious one: Mitch hasn't grown out of sibling rivalry yet. So it's revealed that, on the day Liz was proudly breaking gender barriers in high-school football, her parents took Mitch out for a movie instead of attending, and in her anger Liz lets slip that, hey, it's been three decades, and the four Lemons are squabbling and fussing. Colleen is satisfied. Jack, while temporarily sad, finally shares a Christmas moment with her.

As a 30 Rock episode, I rate this 8/10: it's tightly written, full of music and heart and family togetherness (of one kind or another).
As a Christmas show, I rate this 8/10, if only because I know there are better Christmas 30 Rocks to come.

Ludachristmas  30 Rock: Season 2

25 Days of Christmas #8b: "Back For Christmas"

And here's another Christmas-inspired story from Alfred Hitchcock and his little elves: "Back For Christmas."

Mr. Hitchcock loved John Williams: he was in ten episodes of ...Presents, more than anyone else, and appeared in Dial M For Murder and To Catch A Thief. We open to the sound of digging, and quickly realize the hole is perfectly proportioned to receive a body, that of our hero's wife. Herbert Carpenter told his wife Hermione he's digging for a wine cellar, though she can't quite understand why he insists on doing the work himself. After all, he's not a young man anymore, and they have a nice house, and that's why you hire people.

The unhappy couple are about to leave town for several months, so Herbert can work his metallurgical job for an aeronautics company in California. At the goodbye party, Hermione reassures all their friends that they'll definitely be back for Christmas. Herbert isn't sure -- he enjoyed his previous trip and might want to stay longer. After the friends leave, and the final pieces are tidied up, Herbert lures Hermione down to the cellar and uses the hole for its intended purpose.

The original short story this is based on is much more graphic: Herbert is a doctor, and we see this:

He crossed the hall, sprang the latch of the front door, went upstairs, and taking his instruments from the washbasin, finished what he had to do. He came down again, clad in his bath gown, carrying parcel after parcel of towelling or newspaper neatly secured with safety pins. These he packed carefully into the narrow, deep hole he had made in the corner of the cellar, shovelled in the soil, spread coal dust over all, satisfied himself that everything was in order, and went upstairs again. He then thoroughly cleansed the bath, and himself, and the bath again, dressed, and took his wife's clothing and his bath gown to the incinerator.

This is a dark, comically nasty little story, much more in the vein of this series than our previous episode. However, apart from the title, there is only one piece of the story about Christmas: Hermione wanted them back  specifically for Christmas not because she was the domineering, power-hungry shrew Herbert thought, but because she'd hired builders to excavate the basement and build Herbert his wine cellar.

As an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, I rate this 8/10. It's mean and funny and suspenseful, and the twist at the end is just right.
As a Christmas show, I rate this 1/10. You hear the word "Christmas" a lot here, but apart from that twist, the holiday is meaningless.

Back for Christmas  Alfred Hitchcock Presents - Season One

25 Days of Christmas #8a: "Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid"

So next up, we have two very different episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, both from the first season. First up, "Santa Claus and the Tenth Avenue Kid."

We open with Mr. H., who has just finished bricking up his chimney. Santa won't stop tracking soot all over his carpets, you see, so he's set a deadly trap for the jolly red one.

So Harold Sears (call him Stretch) is a five-time loser, who's finally gotten out on parole, just in time for Christmas. He's pretty old, and as a parolee nearly unemployable. However, Miss Webster (played by Virginia Gregg, also known as the voice actress behind Norma Bates), the well-meaning woman who runs his new halfway house, has found him a temp job as a department store Santa. Sure, and as a thief, what better place could he hope to work?

But Stretch is getting older, and a week of childlike belief in his inherent goodness has softened him up some. So, when he meets a kid well on his way to a life of crime, Stretch gets the kid the only thing he wants, a toy rocket that costs a week's salary. Of course, the efficient Miss Webster arranged for Sears' pay to go to her, so she can set up a nice stable bank account, so Stretch has to steal the rocket.

In the end, Miss Webster is able to convince Stretch's parole officer to let this one slide, as Sears will pay for the rocket, and since it's Christmas. I don't want to do this with every Christmas show I see, but I can't help but think of forgiveness. Christmas, at its heart, is a story of a wise, older guy who sees young sinners and sacrifices himself to keep them on the right path. Stretch is no saint, but he might have the makings of a truly good person somewhere in there. This isn't like any of the other episodes of this show I've seen -- while it doesn't get too sentimental, it's sweet-natured and all the humor is warm.

As an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I rate this a 3/10. There's nothing artistically wrong with it, but it doesn't capture the tone and style of what I know about the show.
As a Christmas show, I rate this 8/10. While the story is simple, it's a nice crime-inspired take on redemption and forward-looking forgiveness.

Santa Claus and the 10th Avenue Kid  Alfred Hitchcock Presents - Season One