Christmas in July

Abstract

namely, the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular and the Park Avenue Christmas Tree Lighting and Carol Sing, I am still thinking about what I experienced at these two events in New York. The ghost of Christmas past still haunts me in July. Residing in the New York metropolitan area does not put those of us who live there beyond the occasional need to play the tourist in our own Big Apple. So when a friend suggested we attend the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, I welcomed the opportunity. I had seen the show only once before—some thirty years ago—and it seemed like a good way to begin the holiday season. Radio City Music Hall, part of the Rockefeller Center complex, is a cavernous and opulent theatre seating nearly 6,000 people, a vintage Art Deco masterpiece that opened in 1932. It is furnished with a twin-console “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ of 4,400 pipes, boasts a full orchestra, and features the famous Rockettes with their high-kick dance line. The annual Christmas Spectacular is not as pricey as Broadway, and many working parents can still afford to come to it with their children and flash cameras in tow. The program is an amalgam of pop-culture Christmas scenes: a high-tech animation sequence that gives the audience, bedecked in 3-D eyeglasses, the exhilarating sensation of flying with Santa Claus over the streets of Manhattan; the incredibly synchronized dancing of the Rockettes; a sampling from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker; and a procession of live sheep and camels moving on stage silently and deliberately to Bethlehem. The show builds to a climactic “living nativity” as majestically garbed wise men bow before the Holy Family and offer their gifts to the Christ child. Then the entire audience joins the cast in singing “Joy to the World.” It’s all here American style: a ninety-minute celebration seamlessly combining holiday chutzpuh, sexy chorus girls, Santa Claus, and the infant Savior in a nostalgic setting Theology Today editorial