{"id":214,"date":"2015-12-10T09:30:07","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T14:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/?p=214"},"modified":"2015-12-10T09:30:07","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T14:30:07","slug":"the-christmas-carols-never-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/2015\/12\/the-christmas-carols-never-end\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Carols Never End"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m the kind of person who listens to Christmas music before Halloween even starts, so a good Christmas movie is definitely always “on the list” for me. However after watching so many films I could only help but wonder, how many adaptations of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” are there? Over break I watched the Lifetime movie, “A Diva’s Christmas Carol.”<\/p>\n

The film begins with a scene of children playing fake snow and wrapped Christmas presents on a music video set. A woman with a warm, encompassing voice wanders around a forest full of lit Christmas trees while singing a soulful Christmas love song in a luxurious red and white cloak. Maybe I should have known what I had gotten myself into, but the lure of the lights overwhelmed my sense of reason. I could guess what was going to happen. The materialistic pop diva (Ebony Scrooge) loses touch with reality and forgets about “the real meaning of Christmas,” and I don’t mean Jesus. “Christmas is a marketing machine we cannot ignore,” spouts the Diva after her manager asked Ebony why she planned to do the music video when she is already overbooked. When the Ebony stated, “Tourists would spend anything for a little holiday spirit,” her sentiment rang too true. In this adaptation, Bob is Ebony’s manager who the audience is sympathetic to because Bob has a sick son— named Tim. Subtle. Bob attempts to convince Ebony to be more optimistic towards life saying, “It’s Christmas, you know? Peace on earth good will towards man?” Ebony bluntly replies, “Christmas exists for one reason only–to sell crap to the masses. This year I happen to have a Christmas album. I’m trying to unload some all about that holiday spirit. Please, if people were really interested in peace on earth they’d be doing something about it instead of shopping and overeating and dressing fat old drunks as Santa Clause.”<\/p>\n

Commercial Christmas really is a marketing machine. In fact, as soon as Halloween was over it seemed that the drugstores completely skipped Thanksgiving and went right to Christmas. Ebony states, “I thought my tax dollars built homeless shelters?” Bob interrupts the conversation saying, “Rat holes. Most people would rather die than live in those shelters.” This exchange hark ens back to Bob Crachit and Eboenezer Scrooge’s conversation about the workhorses. When Scrooge asks “Are there no workhouses?” “Are there no shelters?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m the kind of person who listens to Christmas music before Halloween even starts, so a good Christmas movie is definitely always “on the list” for me. However after watching so many films I could only help but wonder, how … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/f2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}