The year without a santa claus

How it works

ABC first broadcast the special on 10 December 1974. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass produced it in the Animagic stop-motion style they used on other holiday hours. The script draws on Phyllis McGinley’s 1956 book of the same name. The broadcast is about 51 minutes. Shirley Booth narrates as Mrs. Claus — her last acting credit. Mickey Rooney voices Santa. The plot starts with a cold, a cranky doctor, and Santa’s fear that nobody believes anymore. Mrs. Claus sends elves Jingle and Jangle, with the reindeer Vixen, to find proof of Christmas spirit. They end up in a place called Southtown, where weather itself is a turf war.

Heat Miser and Snow Miser were created for the special; they are not in McGinley’s book. Dick Shawn voices Snow Miser. George S. Irving voices Heat Miser. Each brother gets a vaudeville-style song with a crew of miniature copies of himself. Mother Nature has to settle their fight so that snow can fall in Southtown and a warm day can visit the Pole. The town then tries to give Santa a day off, which is the irony the title promised: a year that almost had no Santa becomes a year that tries to rest him.

The Misers are the souvenir

Viewers who barely remember the sick-day plot still remember the brothers. Heat Miser claims heat and “green Christmas.” Snow Miser claims ice and the white one. They are sons of Mother Nature in this telling, and they will not yield a town without a bargain. That bargain is the engine of the second half. If you skip to the songs, you still get the special’s public face. If you skip the songs, you have a quieter Mrs. Claus story that the culture does not quote.

Santa: Mickey Rooney, tired of the job for one season. Mrs. Claus: Shirley Booth, narrator and organizer. Jingle and Jangle: elves sent south with Vixen. Snow Miser and Heat Miser: weather brothers, original to the special.

Mother Nature: the parent who ends the standoff. A 2006 live-action remake exists; it is not the puppet hour people mean when they hum the Miser songs. A later special, A Miser Brothers’ Christmas (2008), brought the brothers back. Rankin/Bass also made Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. Those are siblings in a catalogue, not sequels of this plot. Do not file this tape under “the Santa Clause.” Different studio, different craft, different decade.

The culture kept two weather brothers and their songs. Santa’s sick day was only the door they walked through. Play it as a December television hour, not as a theology of the feast. The special assumes Santa is real inside its own frame. Children who want the clay look will recognize it at a glance. Adults who only wanted “the heat one and the snow one” can say that out loud; the rest of the room will know which reel to load.