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Watching episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 of All In The Family on Amazon Prime - one where it's Christmas, Edith sighs and Archie asks her why:
EDITH
I guess I sighed because somehow it just doesn't seem like Christmas.
MIKE
Yeah, I know what you mean, Ma!
ARCHIE
What do you mean, you know what she means?
MIKE
Well - I was just gonna say that we're all kowtowing to Madison Avenue and the almighty cash register! Yeah! She means that Christmas has been exploited by big business. It's a victim of crass commercialism!
EDITH
Oh, my! Did I mean all that?
GLORIA
You know, Michael's right. Christmas is never like what you read about. Nobody ever sits around the fire, roasting chestnuts and telling ghost stories.
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Now, that last line baffled me.
Ghost stories?
I played it back again to make sure I heard it right.
Yes. She said ghost stories.
Wouldn't that be more like for Halloween, rather than Christmas?
Is the telling of ghost stories a Christmas tradition in some families?
Or did the actress Sallly Struthers, who played Gloria, slip and say the line wrong and nobody noticed?
Or they noticed but didn't have time to re-shoot?
That show was always filmed before a live audience.
Then, there's another head-scratcher just a little later in the episode: Mike says, in that fond-memory tone of voice that people get:
"I remember when I was a kid, my whole family used to sit under the Christmas tree and sing carols."
Sit under a Christmas tree? The ones I've seen had branches low on the trunk and they would be in the way of anyone trying to sit under the tree. That's crazy. People would not - fit, under a Christmas tree.
Did the actors and director of this show have Christmas eggnog before shooting this episode?
-30-
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