The First CD of Christmas

There are lot of Christmas movies and animated TV specials with songs and instrumental scores that I like: White Christmas (1954), Babes in Toyland (1961), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), The Small One (1978) and Gremlins (1984). I only own one Christmas movie soundtrack on CD and that's Home Alone (1990). I didn't own a CD player when the movie came out, but when I started buying CDs, it was one of my firsts. It's not just a Christmas thing either. Every year at Thanksgiving, my mom's whole side of the family would get together and my uncle would offer to take all my cousins and me to the movies but it never happened. To this day, I've only ever been to the theater on Thanksgiving once, when all my aunts and uncles together took us to Home Alone. I think of that every Thanksgiving as it's one of the happiest memories of my life, plus I saw the trailer for Edward Scissorhands (another somewhat Christmas movie with a great soundtrack). I learned to comb my hair and put on deodorant from the aftershave screaming scene so you know the movie's ingrained in my daily routine. Speaking of the aftershave scenes, without the lip-synching one I might never have been exposed to Mel Tormé, and I personally think he's better than Bing Crosby OR Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately for the time being I don't own any of his Christmas albums. I just rewatched the DVD with the director's commentary and I learned that John Williams wasn't the first choice for composer on Home Alone. The director wanted Bruce Broughton, who coincidentally did lots of other holiday-themed soundtracks, including The Thanksgiving Promise (1986) and Miracle on 34th Street (1994). Nobody thought John Williams would do a "kiddie" movie, but then he followed this one up with Hook (1991). That leads me to my final point. What's so great about Home Alone is that John Williams didn't treat it like a "kiddie" movie and neither did the rest of the cast or crew. Director Chris Columbus even claims that he was inspired by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations (1860) and Oliver Twist (1837), which are both dark stories about kids in over their heads. This reminds me of an IMDb comment I read recently, by Lou Pine from Dublin, about the movie Parents (1989):

"There is an aspect to childhood that is too often (and in the case of Hollywood almost always) forgotten and that is the dark side. The world for a child does not always appear as a bright, shining place of wonder and joy; more often than not the world is strange, forbidding and completely out of our control. That appearance is not deceptive; what is deceptive is the web of fictions we build up over time to help us deal with this. For me part of the thrill of horror (real horror, not simply the slash and stack variety), is the remembrance of that childhood chill, the memory of what Lovecraft termed cosmic horror and Freud called the Uncanny. Regardless of who those people are, parents as the symbol of unimpeachable, unquestioned authority whom we have to trust regardless of their real motives, are a potent representation of this chaotic universe, a universe that could crush us at any moment if it wanted to, but which we're stuck with."