The Littlest Christmas Tree
In my other blog, watchingsitcoms, I wrote about my love of Christmas and Christmas music. (You can read about it here, if you care.)
I mentioned in that blog that I had found a CD of an old Christmas album from my childhood on iTunes and I was loving it. But I forgot to mention one track on my LP, that was not on the new CD. I’m not exactly certain why. I guess it might have something to do with copyright issues, but I’ll bet it was for another reason altogether.
The missing track wasn’t actually a song, it was a story told to music by Red Skelton. Probably no one under 40 even knows who Red Skelton is anymore, but when I was little, he was still a fairly popular comedian. Over many years, from the 1930’s into the 1970’s, he had both radio and TV shows. He has gained some little notoriety in recent years because of something he did back in 1969. It was a monologue about the Pledge of Allegiance, but this blog isn’t about that. If you’re interested in it, I know a Google search will bring it up for you to hear.
What I’m talking about is a story he told on my album, First Christmas Record for Children, entitled “The Littlest Christmas Tree.” I think that it was probably not on the CD because it is somewhat controversial. I never realized it as a child, but the story, which is a conversation between Santa Claus and a little tree in someone’s house on Christmas Eve, was basically anti-communist propaganda. It’s still an adorable story, but somehow, listening to it as an adult, it makes me laugh.
In any case, I did manage to find a .wav file on line so that I could put it on my CD, after I downloaded the rest of the songs from iTunes.
Here is a version that someone uploaded to YouTube. Enjoy!!
