Tuning In the Spirit : Like a Garrulous Patriarch, Television Now Presides at Most Holiday Gatherings

Ah, holiday memories.

Remember the year we couldn’t afford a turkey, so Pa had to go out and shoot one?

Or was that the Thanksgiving we visited “The Waltons”?

Then there was the time those children got sick on Christmas Eve, so we all gathered at the orphanage and sang carols.

Or was that the Christmas we spent with “Doogie Howser, M.D.”?

And what about that New Year’s Eve we all got together and blew up the cruise ship that was holding Father Time hostage? Or was that “The A Team”? “Ozzie and Harriet”?

Like much in our culture, American holiday traditions have become inextricably entangled with their televised versions. From the moment Grandpa clicks on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade till a bleary-eyed Aunt Ethel passes out during the Rose Bowl wrap-up, the American family is bombarded with video images of jive-talkin’ turkeys and sincere sitcom Santas. Between today and the first of the year, the networks will broadcast an estimated 743,000 football games, and everyone from the New Kids on the Block to Dolly Parton will assault the nation with good cheer.

So pervasive is this saturation, that holiday rituals themselves have changed; in some cases TV has become the ritual. And that’s not always so merry and bright.

The Zemlicka family of Manhattan Beach began a new holiday rite several years ago. Now, each Thanksgiving morning, Kellie Zemlicka gives her husband, Brian, a card that celebrates this meaningful new tradition.

The card depicts a Thanksgiving table. At one end, a woman sits eating turkey. At the other, a man wearing a football helmet stares at a small television.

On the other hand, some of Kevin Aucello’s fondest holiday moments radiate from the electronic hearth. “At Christmas, you’re so psyched by all the shopping, all the wonder, all the products--and TV shows are a part of that. They get you into the mood for all the good feelings.”

When he returns to his hometown in Florida this Christmas, he and his family will probably gather to watch “Miracle on 34th Street” or “Babes in Toyland.” But the “big three” events of the holiday season remain “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” and “Frosty,” the 31-year old San Diego banker says.

And since he doesn’t go home until Christmas week, he has had to modify his holiday ritual a bit. “Now I call up one of my buddies and say, ‘Rudolf’s’ on tonight. What are you doing?.’ ”

The TV set has become as integral as the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas tree to America’s holiday season.

“Television does not reflect culture any more, it is our culture. It’s at the center of everything we do,” says Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and chair of the Department of Communications at New York University. “Every tradition, every icon, every personage that is central to the culture really comes to us through television now, and television, of course, transforms them in the process.”

That’s what happens in the current film “Avalon,” which follows a large inter-generational family of immigrants over the course of several decades.

As the movie unfolds, the family celebrates three Thanksgiving dinners, separated by untold years. The first scene, before television, is a cacophony of family chatter, laughter, and the sort of storytelling that binds people with a shared mythology. At the second Thanksgiving, some years later, a television flickers in the living room as the huge clan, already beginning to unravel, shares its meal in the dining room.

And at the third dinner, the cluster of cousins and aunts and nephews and grandparents that once held regular family circle meetings has disintegrated, and a lone young couple and their children silently eat Thanksgiving dinner on TV trays, transfixed by a glowing television screen.

Family therapists who have seen that scene find it rich with significance. But none is willing to point the finger directly at television as a holiday home-wrecker. Nor are most families.

“In my family, if there’s a holiday meal, and say, the Rose Bowl game is on, it’s a tossup as to whether to eat around the table or eat in the family room and watch the game,” says Kenneth Sereno, an associate professor of communications at USC, and an expert on family communication.

That contrasts sharply with the holiday meals Sereno, 55, recalls from his childhood. Back then, the family, like the family in “Avalon,” would converse and share stories.

“But I didn’t think we had much sparkling conversation. We ate, and there was routine small talk. It wasn’t particularly exciting.”

Bill Schreiner, a Mt. Washington screenwriter and former director of the Groundlings improvisational troupe, has seen television change the dynamics of his large Catholic family. But not necessarily for the worse.

Each holiday season, he and his wife Dana and their son join his parents and his seven brothers and sisters and their spouses and their children at the family home in Virginia.

“It used to be that the big dinners, Thanksgiving, and all those holidays were very much oriented around traditional things: Thinking back over the year, discussing accomplishments. . . , “ he says.

The one family ritual that hasn’t changed is Christmas Eve. The Schreiners still attend midnight Mass en masse, and then return home to sing Christmas carols around a fire.

But when his father retired from his practice as a physician, he also retired his lifelong disgust with televised football. Now “the holiday season is oriented around what the NFL teams are doing that day,” Schreiner says.

But that doesn’t bother Schreiner, even though he isn’t a big football fan. Because at least it gives the family another reason to congregate. “That ballgame is going to be watched come hell or high water, and if you want to hang with the gang, you’ve gotta watch. It hasn’t really displaced anything in our holiday proceedings, it’s a new event,” Schreiner says.

But some observers lament the passing of un-mediated traditions.

Historically, virtually every human tribe would gather around the campfire at important moments to sing and dance and tell stories, says Michael Real, chair of the Department of Telecommunications and Film at San Diego State University. These gatherings allowed them to feel each other’s presence and share what the particular event was about--whether it was preparing for battle or the harvest or a religious holiday.

Now, at traditional holidays--and created ones such as the Super Bowl--folks gather around their surrogate fires in huge numbers, Real says. But while that experience may create a sense of mass solidarity, it doesn’t foster deep connections between people, nor does it instill the same rich mythology.

In his book “Prime Time Society,” University of Michigan anthropologist Conrad Kottak examines the way the rise of television can change the way a society celebrates holidays--in one example, the way Brazil celebrates Christmas.

There, as here, Kottak found, television’s effects are “comparable to those of humanity’s most powerful institutions--family, church, state, and education.”

In Brazil, Christmas was traditionally an intimate religious holiday, celebrated locally and without much razzmatazz. Since television spread into the majority of households, though, Christmas has become a national event--”an occasion for spending large sums of money on gifts and feasting,” Kottak writes.

And while sales statistics suggest that this new tradition has made Brazil’s retailers jolly, older citizens lament the loss of more private rituals.

The motivations behind the ho-ho-hoopla are easy to guess, however. “It is easier for manufacturers to plan products to appear at a particular season than to stagger production and distribution,” Kottak writes. Also, “fads, which stimulate sales, are easier to sustain for a few weeks than a year.”

So it’s little wonder that instead of menorahs and mangers, Brazilian families now encounter popular Christmas icons each time they turn a channel--including one department store’s team of Santas, who fan the holiday spirit by clapping wildly and bounding around on trampolines.

Sound familiar?

In America, says Postman, “There still exist family and regional traditions that have little to do with television, but they’re increasingly on the periphery of the culture. The main events occur on television. Television really gives us the images of what Thanksgiving and Christmas should be like. It tells us what we should eat, what we should wear, if we should sing songs. It defines what family means.”

In the United States, the pervasive media celebration has sandblasted away the finer edges of families’ unique rituals. One often-cited example is the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Historically a relatively low-key event, it is increasingly accompanied by distinctly Christmas-like hype and fanfare.

In a country as ethnically diverse as the United States, this homogenization is troublesome, says Janine Roberts, associate professor of family therapy at the University of Massachusetts. Most cultures have a unique way to mark the winter solstice, for example. Yet some of her clients, including immigrants from Puerto Rico and Vietnam, complain that the televised flurry of American holiday images excludes their less mainstream traditions and obliterates the quiet power of old-fashioned storytelling. Children in particular, begin to doubt the validity of their heritage.

Meanwhile, all the ersatz warmth and good will emanating from the set can injure more than a family’s aesthetic sensibilities, some therapists warn. “Holiday blues,” for instance, can be triggered or exacerbated by all those perfect families laughing and singing and sharing expensive gifts on the tube.

Dysfunctional families, lonely widows, divorced men, just about anyone who doesn’t have a Cosby Christmas can “feel like like they’re pressing their nose against the glass, looking at a life they can’t share,” says John Murray, the head of the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Kansas State University.

Elizabeth Thoman, executive director of the Center for Media and Values at USC, suggests that families turn the tables on their television, using a video camera to record their family rituals in the form of a story, rather than letting the tube dictate their holiday rites.

She also advises families that watch commercial television to “Be picky. Don’t let it dominate the whole day like video wallpaper.” And finally, she suggests that the family use the holiday season to examine and challenge the commercialism and materialism with which the media indoctrinate them year-round. “Don’t just be recipients of the messages that we’re nothing unless we have something else.”

In America, the television “has become a member of the family that has to be dealt with like any other member,” she says. Most people, however, never acknowledge the new member, let alone examine how it affects them. “We’d like to see people take advantage of this new member of the family, and encourage it to be disciplined.”

Oddly enough, there are an increasing number of Baby-Boom types who seem ready to pull the plug on their television-tied holiday traditions.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, “people were into streamlining everything,” including the holidays, says Maureen O’Hara, a San Diego-area family therapist. Parents didn’t have time to pass on recipes for plum pudding, or to teach the proper way to make Christmas wreaths.

But now, O’Hara frequently encounters people of Baby Boom age and younger, who are eager to recapture those old pre-TV recipes and rituals.

Unfortunately, the young families tend to botch things a bit, she says. It’s not really their fault, though.

If sister’s singing around the Christmas tree has the odd inflections of a young Susan Dey, if decorating the tree evokes images of Hoss and Adam and Little Joe; if a heartfelt gift exchange resonates with the Dick Van Dyke Christmas scenes in “thirtysomething,” it’s no coincidence.

Lacking the storytelling rituals that transferred information through generations, today’s families get their nostalgia for pre-TV holiday traditions, as well as their information concepts of what those traditions should be, from their newest but most trusted family member: the television.