Past Holiday Specials Promote Hate, Bullying; Do Idahoans Buy-In?

With less than a week until Christmas Day, many Idaho families are knocking classic holiday shows and movies off their viewing lists. In recent years, some of the old favorites many of us grew up watching have come under fire for being too insensitive and not politically correct in this day and age.

We just crossed another three Christmas movies off the list over the weekend. Fred Clause, Four Christmases, and Christmas Vacation accounted for six hours of my Saturday. Last week, we sat down with our seven-year-old son and watched a few of the holiday specials from the fifties and sixties that I remember my mother tuning into for my brother and I.

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I also have a daughter that is celebrating her twenty-first birthday this week, and we played classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas for her just about every Christmas season since she was born. Looking back at the decades these shows were made, sure, there is some content that modern-day parents might find offensive or promoting the teaching of bad values to kids, but these shows are far more harmless to a kid's psyche than most of the crap children are watching on their tablets. YouTube has even gotten out of control with some of the content that has been deemed appropriate.

Many believe that the 1964 Rudolph special is the worst offender of them all. Santa Clause and Rudolph's gym coach are pretty harsh to the tiny reindeer when it's discovered his nose glows "like a blinking beacon," but does this mean the majority of Americans should stop letting their kids view these nostalgic specials?