The Top 8 Reasons why Christmas in the ’70s was Awesome

We didn’t really get the whole dentist elf story line, but we went with it. It was the ’70s.

It’s no surprise that people tend to view the decade of their childhood as the best. As kids, we look at the world with innocence and wonder through formative eyes that are focused mostly on the good things in the world rather than the bad. The popular culture of the day is what helps form us into the adult we later become. Every decade, therefore, is somebody’s favorite and rightly so.

All that crap said, the ’70s were clearly the best for everything.

I began the ’70s as a 4-year-old and ended them at 14, so almost all of my growing up memories were forged during that decade. Isn’t it interesting that Christmas seems to claim more than its fair percentage of our memory banks? A lot of what I can recall from my childhood has to do with Christmastime.

So let’s jump right into it. Here are my Top 8 reasons why Christmas in the ’70s was awesome.

8. It was still OK to call it Christmas  Ahh, the good old days. Bruce Jenner was a hero because he won the Decathlon at the Olympics and you could freely say “Merry Christmas” without fear of someone suing you over it. All was right with the world.

7. The Malls  In those days, malls were still a fairly new concept. Though the enclosed mall was introduced in the 1950s, malls as we know them hit their strides in the ’70s. They were still family oriented and friendly as opposed to the hoodlum hangouts many have become today. There was nothing more wonderful for an 8-year-old than to enter the mall on a cold December evening, holding hands with Mom or Dad, and be greeted by the friendly voice of Andy Williams echoing through the warm, cavernous building and the almost blinding glare of silver and gold decor everywhere you looked. In the mall where we shopped in Raleigh, N.C., there was a department store that created a children’s shopping section that only they could enter — no grownups allowed. There were crafty knick-knack stores that played dulcimer music and smelled like fir boughs. There were long lines waiting for a visit with Santa, and when they took your picture, it was a real print on quality photo paper (as opposed to the digital crap-ola they give you now). It was also fun to slip into Spencer’s when your parents thought you were in Kaybee Toys, innocently find yourself in the forbidden, glowing back of the store, and inspect the fuzzy, risqué, blacklight posters under the guise of searching for an age-appropriate unicorn or black leopard. I’m pretty sure most pre-teen boys received their sexual educations in the ’70s by simply perusing the back aisles of Spencer’s.

6.  The Music  When it comes to Christmas music, I’d argue that there was a 30-year block of time between 1950 and 1980 that was responsible for most of the best. Classic recordings by Crosby, Cole, Como, Mathis, Williams, Autry, Ives, Guaraldi, Lee, and Sinatra — all produced between 1950 and 1970 — pretty much set us up for the next millennium, but Christmas radio in the 1970s was great because a few new classics were added (a caterwauling Yoko Ono notwithstanding) to an already perfect lineup of songs. We didn’t yet have the clutter of all the modern music remakes that would come in the ’80s and ’90s, many of which I view as throwaways. (For what I consider the best, see my list, “The Top 15 Indispensable Christmas Songs.”)

5. The Absence of Black Friday and Cyber Monday   In the ’70s, Christmas shopping was a community event and it was generally completed, start to finish, over the last couple weeks before the holiday. Unless you were ordering stuff from a Sears or Montgomery (Monkey) Ward catalog — and nobody I knew did this for Christmas — you physically ventured out into the world to get your stuff. But we didn’t all go on the same dang day. And nobody went at midnight, turkey grease still gleaming on our chins. Were there unfriendly people and crazy traffic? Sure. But there were even more people in festive moods, holding doors for one another and offering “Merry Christmas” with gusto.

4. The Gifts  It seems to me that popular culture of the past three decades has shaved at least four years off of kid-dom and added that onto the beginning of adulthood. Gone, practically, are the activity-and-imagination-inducing gifts of the ’70s — skateboards, ball gloves, banana-seat bikes, Light-Brite sets, dollhouses, football jerseys and helmets, fishing poles, and the rare Atari Pong — only to be replaced by Visa gift cards, iPhones, and an avalanche of Pong’s invasive descendants: Call of Duty, Halo, Black Ops, and other war games. In the ’70s, we were simply trying to get a blip past the other guy’s paddle blip. Now we’re blowing people away. In the ’70s, Christmas afternoon happened outside with your buddies or your siblings. In the 2010s, more often than not, it happens alone on a screen device in your bedroom. Point, ’70s.

3. The Tree Lots  This one is personal and it’s not so much a comparison as a recollection. Some of you may know that I grew up on a Christmas tree farm and my family has sold trees since the late ’60s in the Raleigh area. So it’s no surprise that my earliest childhood memories often include the chilly days and nights I spent running amuck on our Christmas tree lot, playing tag with my sister and brother among the forest of Fraser firs and white pines before retreating to the “elf house” for a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a lecture from my Dad about staying out of the way of customers. There was always Charlie Brown music combined with the drone of traffic and chainsaws, twinkling light strings, velvet bows, miniature candy canes, split-rail fence, and trash cans bursting with baling twine and Burger King bags. Even after I was old enough to be drafted into employment on the lot, the atmosphere was jolly, the Christmas spirit was rampant, and we all went home exhausted but happy, smelling like an evergreen tree. Life was good and all my friends thought it was cool that my family grew and sold Christmas trees as if I had an inside connection to Santa himself.

2. The TV specials  Much like shopping, TV viewing in the ’70s was a community event. There were three stations (four, counting PBS if you could get it) and no VCRs, DVRs, OnDemand, or anything like that, so the entire country watched the same shows at the same time and millions of toilets flushed in unison during commercials. There was nothing, I mean, NOTHING more exciting for a ’70s kid than seeing “the following is a special presentation” come across the screen of your giant, console TV screen at 7 p.m in early December. You knew that meant that either Burl Ives as a snowman or the Grinch or Charlie Brown or a Fred Astaire mailman were soon to follow.

The claymation Rankin/Bass specials were still new and they were magical, if not a little bit freaky. The Abominable Snowman in Rudolph scared the crap out of us until his teeth were weirdly extracted. We wept with the doll on the island of misfit toys, although we never really understood that storyline, or that of Hermey, the sadistic dentist elf, or why Rudolph’s dad, the coach, and Santa himself were all a-holes. We loved the Grinch animation because it was done by the same guy (Chuck Jones) who created the best Looney Tunes cartoons. (But of course, we didn’t know that fact. We just felt it.) We loved watching Kris Kringle grow his beard and get fat, and we were slightly confused by how the Winter Warlock was as big as a mountain at first but then became only a little taller than everybody else. But it was cool and we moved on. And of course, we giggled at how Pig Pen created a cloud of dust every time he inhaled during “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” But we also felt a little inappropriate for laughing at him.

(See my “Top 10 Christmas Shows.) The entire experience of Christmas in the ’70s was intertwined with these shows — they were all we had. Sure, they still show these specials in the 2010s, but it’s difficult for them to captivate today’s CGI-hardened kiddos in the same way. Back then, they were game-changers.

1. Santa still came  Yes, I know Santa still comes in the 2010s, but for me, he stopped leaving unwrapped gifts in the ’80s. In the ’70s, however, SC made distinct little piles of goodies for each of the three of us, and we instinctively knew which pile was which. One of us, usually me, would wake up well before daylight and lay there desperately searching the sky for any glimmer of sunrise and comparing every house noise against my mental archive of Santa or reindeer sounds. (A little context here: After the Great Christmas Debacle of 1977 — when we convinced each other it was morning at, like, 4 a.m. and prematurely launched the ship — a daylight rule was quickly established by the management.) When, after the committee of three had concluded that it was, in fact, morning enough, we would ease downstairs and into the darkened living room. Bedlam would ensue because SANTA HAD COME! It was, hands down, the best 10 seconds of the entire kid year.

Come to think of it, it was probably the best 10 seconds ever.

Merry Christmas to you and your families, and THANK YOU for reading my blogs this year! Leave your Christmas memories of YOUR favorite decade in the comment section below.