I was a huge fan of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone when I was a kid, and I recently watched all of the episodes again. The shows have aged well, and they are still relevant today, in my view.
The fantasy and sci-fi TV
program was imaginative, clever and well-written. Serling (seen in the above photo), the author of
some of the TV plays on The Twilight Zone, was the host and narrator of
the classic TV series.
Arlen Schumer, the author and designer of Visions From the Twilight Zone (Chronicle Books, 1990), a coffee-table art book, and a volume of essays, The Five Themes of the Twilight Zone (Bear Manor Media, 2024), recently penned a piece on Rod Serling for the Washington Times (where my On Crime column also appears).
‘There’s a wondrous magic to Christmas,” a wise man once observed, “a special power reserved for little people.” The author of those words was neither Dickens nor Dr. Seuss, nor any Christian, Catholic or Protestant clergyman. They were written, rather, by Rod Serling, a Jewish man born 100 years ago on Christmas Day, and later the creator, and host, of the greatest television series of all time.
In the 156 episodes of “The Twilight Zone” (1959-1964), only one, “The Night of the Meek,” broadcast on CBS on Dec. 23, 1960, featured a Christmas theme. Though Serling was “fiercely proud of his heritage,” according to “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling” (2013), a memoir by his daughter Anne, the future TV icon was like a lot of American Jews: an annual sufferer of Christmas envy who celebrated the day more as a secular, cultural event, like Thanksgiving, and to tap into what “Meek” termed the “wondrous magic” surrounding Jesus’ birthday.
As a radio writer in early 1950s Cincinnati, Serling had already penned a number of Yuletide-themed dramas, including an unproduced piece titled “No Christmas This Year.” It was a black comedy about a society that stops celebrating the holiday, with Santa besieged by striking elves and strafed by antiaircraft fire.
Some of the characters in “No Christmas” were recycled for “Meek.” Art Carney (seen in the below photo), who played Ed Norton on “The Honeymooners,” starred as Henry Corwin, a down-on-his-luck department-store Santa suffering from alcohol addiction. At one point, fired by the store, Corwin looks up from his shot of booze and stares not at the bartender but straight into the camera, asking the viewer: “Why isn’t there a real Santa Claus?” He soon finds a mysterious bag that enables him to lavish Christmas gifts on the less fortunate — and on himself the opportunity for redemption at the heart of Christianity.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
Wondrous magic: Christmas in 'The Twilight Zone' - Washington Times
And you can also watch the episode via the below link:
Night Of The Meek - Twilight Zone Original Christmas Episode - video Dailymotion
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