{"id":2207,"date":"2022-12-12T08:10:45","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T13:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2207"},"modified":"2022-12-12T08:10:45","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T13:10:45","slug":"how-the-grinch-stole-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/12\/how-the-grinch-stole-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.
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Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being.<\/em>

On December 26, 1956, Ted Geisel stared at himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth.
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What he saw was what he later described as \u201ca very Grinch-ish countenance.\u201d\u00a0
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Even though he was a bestselling author and illustrator of children\u2019s books, Theodor Seuss Geisel \u2013 better known as Dr. Seuss \u2013 felt depressed.\u00a0 His wife was in the middle of a chronic health crisis.\u00a0 Christmas irritated him.\u00a0 He saw it as little more than a commercial racket.\u00a0 Geisel wondered how he had ended up wallowing in such cynicism.\u00a0\u00a0
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He resolved to write a book about the face he saw in the mirror.\u00a0 \u201cI wrote about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I\u2019d lost.\u201d\u00a0 Just as Charlie Brown\u2019s neurotic, I\u2019m-an-all-time-loser persona was a direct reflection of his creator, Charles M. Schulz, the pinched green face of the Grinch was how Dr. Seuss pictured himself.\u00a0
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How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,<\/em> published in 1957, was his attempt to compose a happier ending to his own story.\u00a0
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Nine years later, on December 18, 1966, Geisel\u2019s Christmas masterpiece debuted on CBS as an hour-long animated TV special.\u00a0 Boris Karloff, famous for his roles as Frankenstein<\/em> and The Mummy<\/em> three decades earlier, provided the creepy voiceover.
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According to the story, the Grinch lives in a mountain hideaway just north of Whoville, a community of incorrigibly happy citizens.\u00a0 He\u2019s had to put up with their celebration of Christmas for 53 years (as observers later noted, Geisel was 53 years old when he wrote the book).\u00a0 \u201cAnd then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!\u201d\u00a0 The Grinch hates the three central pillars of the Who Christmas \u2013 the noise, the food, and the singing.\u00a0 He determines to eliminate them all.
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What accounts for this dreadful disposition?\u00a0\u00a0
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Maybe the Grinch\u2019s head wasn\u2019t screwed on just right, or maybe his shoes might have been too tight.\u00a0 \u201cBut I think that the most likely reason of all, may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.\u201d\u00a0 That was Geisel\u2019s self-diagnosis.\u00a0 He was suffering from \u201cheart disease.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
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The Grinch swoops into Whoville on December 24 and snatches every vestige of Christmas.\u00a0 He intends to throw the presents, the decorations, and the roast beast off the edge of a precipice.
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So far so good.\u00a0 At this point in the book, Geisel has crafted a monster who perfectly embodied his own monstrous attitude.\u00a0
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But now he had a problem.\u00a0 How was he going to redeem the Grinch?\u00a0 In other words, how was he going to save himself from his own wretched Grinchiness?\u00a0
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Geisel struggled for three months.\u00a0 He later wrote, \u201cI got hung up getting the Grinch out of the mess.\u00a0 I got into a situation where I sounded like a second-rate preacher\u2019\u2019 \u2013 contemplating slick and easy theological solutions, that is.\u00a0 Suddenly a picture came into his mind.\u00a0 He imagined the Grinch and the Whos having Christmas dinner together \u2013 and the Grinch himself carving the roast beast.\u00a0 What would cause him to arrive at such a place?\u00a0
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It was singing.\u00a0 The Whos were standing and singing because of an internal joy \u2013 a joy that survived all the externals being swept away.\u00a0 Christmas somehow came anyways.
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And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: \u201cHow could it be so?\u201d
It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
\u201cMaybe Christmas,\u201d he thought, \u201cdoesn’t come from a store.<\/em>
Maybe Christmas\u2026perhaps\u2026means a little bit more!\u201d<\/em>
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The best things about Christmas are not found under a tree.\u00a0 It is a very old lesson \u2013 but a lesson we need to learn and relearn every year.\u00a0
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Very few countries are as enthusiastic about Christmas as Japan.\u00a0 Over the past half century, Japanese culture has embraced gift-giving, colored lights, festive parties, and Santa Claus.\u00a0 This is unexpected, to say the least, since only one percent of Japanese citizens identify as followers of Jesus, and December 25 has never been recognized as a national holiday.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
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In the late 1960s, a handful of Americans living in Japan yearned to enjoy a traditional Christmas dinner.\u00a0 Since no grocery store had turkeys, they opted for the next best thing: fried chicken from KFC.\u00a0 Some of their Japanese neighbors were intrigued and a new tradition was born.\u00a0 In 1974 KFC launched a \u201cKentucky for Christmas\u201d campaign.\u00a0 Millions of Japanese now look forward to eating a bucket of fried chicken, side salad, and \u201cChristmas cake\u201d every year \u2013 a special feast that must be ordered weeks in advance.\u00a0
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The people of Japan have enthusiastically embraced the externals of Christmas.\u00a0 But the internal realities of joy and compassion don\u2019t spring from plastic Santas and Christmas cake.\u00a0 They are anchored in the central truth that Christmas is the story of God rescuing our broken world by becoming a human being.
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Grace is what made the Grinch\u2019s heart grow three sizes that day \u2013 the grace of recognizing that life doesn\u2019t come down to what we have, but whether the Creator of Christmas has us.\u00a0
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Here\u2019s what that transformation looks like in the original 1966 movie: Grinch’s Heart Grows – YouTube<\/a>
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Did Ted Geisel get to live out his own happy ending?\u00a0 It\u2019s true that the vanity license plate on his car said \u201cGrinch.\u201d\u00a0 But the exercise he undertook of looking behind the noise and commercialism of all those secular holiday celebrations delivered him from the chains of cynicism.\u00a0
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May we, by God\u2019s grace, have the same experience \u2013 and be able to sing with the people of Whoville, \u201cWelcome Christmas while we stand, heart to heart and hand in hand.\u201d

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here.\u00a0Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being. On December 26, 1956, Ted Geisel stared at himself in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[539],"class_list":["post-2207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2209,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions\/2209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}