Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/25/the-worlds-first-christmas-m.html
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Step it up, Santa! You only have a billion more families to visit.
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Cool! It is played at the correct speed! This wasn’t standardized for quite some time and is why old silent films look sped up because they often were when played back on a standard projector. And it isn’t easy to find variable speed projectors these days (I don’t think).
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Interesting that a British film would use the name “Santa Claus” for the Christmas bringer of gifts, when his traditional name, in England at least, is Father Christmas. (Scotland is a different matter, not least because the country didn’t really rediscover Christmas until the second half of the 20th century.) I’m guessing that in 1898, Father Christmas hadn’t yet fully taken on the role of bringing children presents, and was still mostly seen as an at-best ambiguously Christian Lord of the Revels (or of Misrule) figure: see, for example, the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol, and the Green Knight of Arthurian legend.
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“Silent film night… holy film night…”
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What’s so poignant about films of this era is the realization that everyone in them are now dead. Except Santa.
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Now I’m wishing for a silent film version of Home Alone.
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I don’t think this moving picture fad is going to last.
So in England Santa brings the tree then leaves with it. What is up with that?
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Acutally, the best way to watch Home Alone is to never, ever watch it.
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That stupid kid had the chance to take out Trump in 1992 and totally botched it.
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That was fascinating! Also a reminder of how commercialized Christmas had yet to become.
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