You might have noticed that the Christmas “season” has gotten longer,  because television has been celebrating the holiday since way before Thanksgiving. Sometime in early November, the Hallmark Channel started flooding the airwaves with all kinds of Yule-themed movies and specials, in an apparent effort to either put people in the holiday mood or get them royally sick of Christmas before December even arrived. Well, the fact is one needn’t be subjected to any holiday programming if you’re not interested and I’m sure plenty of the Hallmark offerings have made no impact whatsoever on members of the viewing public. I don’t know about you, but titles like Annie Claus is Coming to Town (would I make this up?), Christmas Comes Home to Canaan, and Cancel Christmas (with Judd Nelson as Santa!), didn’t exactly inspire me to pull up a chair and haul out the eggnog.

I guess television is just doing its job of filling time slots and trying to capture the festive nature of Christmas as the season itself unfolds. Problem is, so much of this is just filler, with no resonance, and a touch of the bland about it. You know the plots even if you haven’t watched—problems arise causing a lapse in belief or a disdain for the happiness others are experiencing at the holidays until something or someone steps in and changes the protagonist’s life, presumably for the better. There are houses festively decorated by the studio prop department, good looking people drinking hot cocoa in cozy sweaters, precocious children saying things like “Is Santa really coming, mommy?,” and snow right on cue. And everybody learns the true meaning of Christmas, I guess.

Happily, there’s one movie that, although it does indeed follow that similar plot route mentioned above, has risen above all this forgettable fodder and maintained its exalted place in the Christmas pantheon, Miracle on 34^th Street. When I was growing up this 1947 theatrical feature really stood out, because there was not an abundance of Yule-themed movies showing up on the dial, outside of the many versions of A Christmas Carol. As I recall, WPIX Channel 11 in New York would feature it among its post-parade Thanksgiving lineup, between Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers (which I didn’t realize at the time was a bogus title for Babes in Toyland), and the Bing Crosby film The Bells of St. Mary’s. Miracle enchanted me from the get-go because it featured scenes of the actual Macy’s parade and period footage of New York (with a side trip to some exotic town called Port Washington); was funny even to a kid with a limited view of the world; had the great premise of making us believe that even if we’re the ones out there purchasing the gifts that Santa Claus might actually exist just the same; and featured the most appealing Kris Kringle ever.

As I got older and became increasingly obsessed with movies, I realized that that Kringle in question was Edmund Gwenn, and that he’d won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. Although I didn’t understand why he was declared a supporting player in a movie he so clearly dominated, this was the sort of honor that gave the Academy mucho credibility in my estimation. Gwenn’s is truly is a wonderful performance, giving the character an optimism and guileless quality that was never forced or sentimental. Minus ample girth or theatrical ho-ho-ho’s, his became the Santa by which all others, on screen, stage, television, and beyond would be judged, in my opinion; reaching a peak no one else has ever approached.

For a while Gwenn was considered so essential to this work that when it was done on radio for a few years following the film’s initial (May!) 1947 release, he was asked to recreate the role on the Lux Radio Theatre and Screen Director’s Playhouse, among others. Sans Gwenn, the movie was redone twice on television in the 1950s, first (with “The” added to its title) as part of The 20^th Century-Fox Hour (1955), that studio’s curious anthology program that remade its own theatrical features, in a shorter, copycat manner, and then as a live presentation (1959, the year Edmund Gwenn passed away, by the way). Thomas Mitchell was Kris the first time out, while Ed Wynn (a very wrong choice, if you ask me) did the role four years down the line. Although Mitchell was easier to take than Wynn, both lacked the gentle British lilt of Gwenn’s voice, which added so much to the part. As if to rectify this, the 1963 Broadway musical adaptation, Here’s Love, had a U.K. Santa, Laurence Naismith, as did the 1973 television remake (Sebastian Cabot), and the 1994 theatrical re-do (Richard Attenborough). Although the stellar source material from the original movie was present each time, there didn’t seem to be much reason for these revamps to exist, except, where the stage version was concerned, for those who wanted songs with their Santa or, in the case of the last two, color.

For a time, it seemed as if It’s a Wonderful Life had fully eclipsed Miracle as THE Christmas movie from Hollywood’s so-called “golden era.” Miracle was around, even in a ghastly colorized print, but many seem to have forgotten its value as the most all-encompassing of Christmas tales. One that, unlike Life, completely, wholly and totally revolved around the Christmas season, and was accessible for nostalgists, sophisticated adults, less-than-sophisticated adults, children, and so forth.

There really is no over-praising the clever story that Valentine Davies came up with and the smart dialogue director George Seaton put to it when whipping it into a shooting script. The movie never falls into gooey sentimentality and yet never takes on that sour, mocking tone that has engulfed many other Yule movies (i.e. A Christmas Story and its ilk). It makes you feel good about the holidays and glad that somebody dreamed up the concept of Santa Claus. It even has a heroic lawyer! You truly get the impression that both Davies and Seaton really cared and believed in what they were doing; that it was not just fodder tossed towards the masses in an effort to make a few bucks off the public’s love of Christmas. Both men, in fact, won well-deserved Academy Awards, in not one but two different writing categories. The industry further knew this was not just a cute nod to the holidays, but genuine quality work, nominating Miracle on 34^th Street as one of the Best Picture finalists for 1947 (coincidentally, there was a second Christmas themed movie in competition that year, The Bishop’s Wife).

My guess is that consciously or subconsciously this movie continues to inspire those Hallmark people, who are hoping they can come up with something as beautifully realized, as iconic, as seemingly effortless in execution, something that is not just a celebration of Christmas, but destined, like Miracle, to become an essential part of it. I wish them luck.