Does anyone remember an old black & white movie "All Mine to Give"? It stars Cameron Mitchel and maybe Glynis Johns--not sure but I don't want to look it up because even the IMDB makes me cry. I think it is set in Canada. Cameron Mitchel is a Scottish lumberjack. The story begins with his courting a newly arrived woman. The story is heartwarming. They are a cute couple and you follow them through twelve or so years and six or seven kids, always thinking things have to get better for Cam and Glynnis because they are so damned appealing but NOOOO. There is a scene where the father takes most of the kids and takes them to live in a miserable deserted cabin in the woods to avoid a plague--Typhoid? Diphtheria? Cholera? Spanish Influenza? Who even knows. You are crying too hard to freaking care! Of course the father dies!
So the mother carries on, a poor, plucky widow with umpteen children. She insists that the oldest boy continue his education and does all kinds of humiliating jobs to keep him in school. So he grows up to be a lawyer and then goes on to become a judge or at least a dashing singer like Ian Tyson....but NOOOO. She dies on the night of the school Christmas program. And he has to go to work at the mines or the textile factory or somewhere awful. My own dad had to go to work at 14 because his father died so of course I was coyote howling by then.
The last scene is the oldest boy trudging through a snow storm, pulling a sled full of his siblings, stopping at houses to give his little brothers and sisters away. ON FREAKING CHRISTMAS EVE!
Who would show slop like this to 1950s kids for a Christmas treat on the last day of school before Christmas vacation? The sorry assed Dominican nuns that ran the school that my sibs and I attended. So I saw that damned thing every year for at least 5 years.
When we cried--we all cried-- it was the baby boom; we all had siblings, naturally we cried! Unfortunately I was the blondest of the little blonde girls so my nose was extra snotty red and drew extra attention from the nuns. To comfort us the nuns would tell us that the movie was based on a true story and we should be HAPPY because we had so much for Christmas. like families. Then they would back up their claims with even sadder stories of whole families freezing to death back in the Kansas dugout days. Stiff as freaking ice statues, with their rosary beads frozen in their hands! (Guess you can't pray the rosary in mittens.)
My siblings were younger, Kimmie and Johnny. I hated them back then. They still drive me nuts. And they rightly hated me--except for about a week after we saw that godawful movie. Then we slept together in one twin bed, our arms wrapped around each other while the snow howled outside our window. In fact,( mff, mff, snort, sob), I think I'll call them now!---s6
Forgive me for wanting realistic holiday movies.
