You don’t have to be much of a curmudgeon to appreciate the pleasures that come with the end of the Christmas season on December 26. The palpable slowing down of pace after the last minute frenzy of gift buying, wrapping, and delivering. The slackening of traffic on the roads, combined with the ability to get a parking spot at the mall. The chance to rest up after the round of Christmas festivities, and gather strength for the onslaught of New Year’s Eve. But for me, this year, there is one special blessing, post holiday.
They’ve stopped playing “Christmas Shoes” on the radio.
You know the song. It’s the one about the guy who’s in the store when he sees a little kid who needs money to buy a pair of shoes for his dying mother. The poor sap rediscovers the true meaning of Christmas when he forks over the dough for the kid to get the shoes. Just in case you forgot, here are the lyrics to the refrain.
“Sir I wanna buy these shoes for my Momma please
It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size
Could you hurry Sir?
Daddy says there's not much time
You see, she's been sick for quite a while
And I know these shoes will make her smile
And I want her to look beautiful
If Momma meets Jesus, tonight.”
What a batch of hooey! What a load of hogwash! The pathetic absurdities of this song beggar the imagination. Consider the baloney you’re being asked to accept when you listen to this load of rubbish.
First, the kid knows his mother’s shoe size. What? I don’t know my mother’s shoe size, and I’ll bet you don’t either. Hellfire, I was well into my twenties before I could have reliably stated that my mom had feet. It just never entered my consciousness.
Second, what kind of shoes are these? Jimmy Choo’s? Manolo Blahnik’s? I mean, seriously, what kind of little kid pays attention to shoe fashion? The only reason I know those names is from watching “Sex and the City” reruns on cable, and I had to Google the names to get the spelling right.
Third, the song posits that what a dying woman wants most before she passes away is a new pair of shoes. Now, you usually can’t go wrong betting on the shallowness and materialism of the American consumer, but the woman is going to die, for cripe’s sake! If I was dying, that sure wouldn’t be the top of my Christmas list. A miracle cure, that’s what I want Santa to drop down my chimney. Or maybe just more morphine to keep the pain pump fully stocked up. But shoes?
What kind of store is this, anyway? Probably a department store, because the narrator isn’t there to buy shoes, he is just there to “pick up a few things.” That raises another question. The kid is described as “dirty from head to toe.” In most upscale stores, the staff wouldn’t let a dirty street urchin wander around, pawing through the merchandise and panhandling from the customers to pay for shoes. The staff would call security, assuming they didn’t just give the kid the bum’s rush on their own. I can picture the response when the kid first walked into the store: “Hey, kid, keep your grubby hands off. That’s cashmere!”
Here’s my theory: the kid and the salesclerk are running a scam. The store overstocked on cheap Chinese knockoffs of designer shoes. The kid spots a mark, turns on the waterworks, and the sucker pays for them. The suddenly overjoyed scamster goes out the front door, and comes around and in through the back door, ready to resell the same pair of shoes with the next mark to walk in. Meanwhile, the clerk cleans up on commissions. Hellfire, the clerk is probably the kid’s real mother! They probably share a good horse laugh over the suckers they rooked when they get home.
Cheating sentimental saps, all in the service of pure commercialism. There’s a Christmas anthem for you. At least we’re all done with that now. That song is off the playlists.
At least until next year.
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Here's a description of the MOVIE. That's right, they made a movie from the song. Why not, after all, that Harper Valley PTA was such a good film.
The Christmas Shoes bounces between two families--the Layton household, where father Robert (Rob Lowe, The West Wing) is so consumed with his work that he misses his daughter's recital; and the Andrews home, where mother Maggie (Kimberly Williams, According to Jim) has been diagnosed with a fatal heart ailment. Desperate to make his mother's last moments happy, Maggie's son Nathan struggles to buy a pair of red dancing shoes that seem like a pair Maggie remembers from her childhood. Naturally, the lives of these families become intertwined, particularly when Robert's wife takes over Maggie's choral program--which topples the already troubled balance between Kate and Robert. Perhaps because Rob Lowe is usually stereotyped as glib and insincere, The Christmas Shoes feels surprisingly heartfelt. The earnestness of The Christmas Shoes surprises because the story originated in the famously sappy country song of the same name, and movies based on songs rarely feel anything but plastic and contrived. There are certainly moments when The Christmas Shoes lays on the sentiment woefully thick, but you'd have to be an ogre not to be touched when Maggie and her husband have one last dance. Also featuring Dorian Harewood (Roots: The Next Generations). --Bret Fetzer
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