Making Christmas Specials: Frosty the Snowman
St. Andrew's Stars Video:
Hespeler, 6 December, 2015 © Scott McAndless – Communion
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n 1969 the decision was made to take
a silly little winter children’s song about a snowman who came to life and turn
it into an animated Christmas special. It was not really a very radical idea.
Five years previously producers had taken another popular Christmas song, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reinde
er, and turned it into what
is probably the most popular Christmas special of all time. If they could do it
for Rudolph, they could surely do it for Frosty and in fact they even hired the
same man, Romeo Muller, who had written the Rudolph special to expand the song’s
story to fill an entire half hour.
But didn’t Romeo
Muller have quite a challenge before him? How do you take a little lightweight
song about what is, I guess, just about everyone’s childhood fantasy (What do
you suppose it would be like if this snowman I’m making came to life?) – how do
you take that and turn it into a full length drama that will engage people and
speak to their hearts? But Muller did a terrific job. And to do it he drew on
some deep and ancient truths. He created what I consider to be nothing less
than a grand parable that communicates the gospel message.
The story already
touched on the oldest mystery of all – the mystery of creation. Ever since they
first started wondering about anything, people have wondered about why they are
here and where they come from. And ancient people, including the ancient people
of Israel ,
often imagined a creation process where the creator first formed people out of
mud or clay and then breathed life into them. And although I think that we all
assume today that the whole creation process must have been a bit more
complicated than that, there is something about that simple image of God
moulding us out of common clay and then breathing his own spirit into us to
give us life that just offers a wonderful symbol of the
meaning behind creation
– how God brought together the material body with that spark of the divine to
create us as spiritual creatures.
Well, of course,
that whole creation scene is re-enacted in the Frosty story except, of course,
instead of mud or clay the creators use snow. Now, the original story in the
original song did not have much of an actual connection with Christmas. It
could have been the story of any snowman made on any winter’s day. But the
producers of the Christmas special wanted to tie the story in with Christmas, so
they made a point of telling us that Frosty wasn’t made out of just any snow
but of Christmas snow. This becomes a
very important point later on. So the Christmas snow stands in for the clay of
creation. And instead of the gift of the spirit or of breath to give the
snowman life we have a hat – not just any hat, but a magic hat.
And so when
Frosty is brought to life it is like a parable of the creation of human life.
To make this very clear in the special, Muller has Frosty himself tell us what
all of this means with his very first words. “Happy Birthday,” he says. It is a
moment of birth, an act of creation. But a simple story of creation, as nice as
it may be, wasn’t going to fill a half hour of prime time. Muller needed to
complicate the story – to introduce a little bit of tension.
He created a new
character, an incompetent magician named Professor Hinkle who is the one who
has lost the magic hat – who threw it away, in fact, because he thought that
there was no magic in it. And when he finds out how wrong he is, he’s ready to
do anything to get it back. And since, in the story, the magic hat seems to
represent life or the gift of the spirit, I guess that makes Professor Hinkle
into the very personification of the evil that is in this world, of those who
would steal life from others to accomplish their own goals. It makes him, if
you like, the devil.
But, if Hinkle is
the devil, who is Frosty? That is the key question! He kind of looks like a new
being – one who has been created out of magic and of snow. You might even call
him a new Adam. And in the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says that
Adam “was a pattern of the one to come.”
(Romans 5:14) That is to say that when Christians look at the story of the
creation of the first man, they should find something that teaches them about
Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished for us.
And I would
suggest that, in the television special, Frosty is very clearly a figure of
Christ. When Frosty’s life is put in danger by rising temperatures, he and his
friends decide that he needs to head north. And one of his friends, a girl
named Karen, will not be separated from him and so she goes with him. All goes
well for a while and the group has many adventures. But, at a certain point the
increasing cold becomes too much for Karen and she collapses. Frosty picks
Karen up and, to save her life, carries her into a heated greenhouse. Karen
wakes up and realizes that Frosty is risking his own life by being in the
greenhouse. She tells him that he must go but he brushes her off and says he
can stand to lose a little weight. But at this point Professor Hinkle comes
along – still following them and still looking to reclaim his hat – and he slams
the door to the greenhouse, locking them both inside.
Trapped inside the
greenhouse, Frosty melts – he dies.
He gives up his life to save Karen from dying in the cold! Does that remind you
of any story you’ve ever heard? Didn’t Jesus say, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his
friends.” (John 15:13) Even more important, didn’t Jesus show with his own
life what such a statement really meant? And so, I think it is very clear that
Frosty’s death in the greenhouse holds many echoes of the central story of the
Christian gospel.
But, of course,
there is more. It is at this point that Santa Claus comes into the story. He
arrives at the greenhouse but is too late to save the snowman. All he finds is
an old silk hat, a corncob pipe, a button, two pieces of coal, a puddle of
water and Karen weeping on her knees just like Mary Magdalene wept outside
Jesus’ tomb. (Coincidence? I don’t think so!) Karen is quite inconsolable in
her grief but Santa Claus says that there is a reason for hope. He says that it’s
because, and only because, Frosty was made out of Christmas snow and there is
something special about Christmas snow – it never goes away. And then Santa
flings open the door of the greenhouse and a gust of cold wind comes in and
sweeps the puddle of water outside where it instantly retakes Frosty’s shape.
Santa puts on the magic hat again and again Frosty comes to life with his same
first words: “Happy Birthday.”
Now, if that isn’t
a resurrection story, I don’t know what is. And I’m not trying to suggest here
that Romeo Muller intentionally borrowed his themes from the gospel story. On
the contrary, I don’t imagine that he was even aware of the connection. But
somehow, and in a way that even he probably didn’t understand, his story tapped
into an eternal truth – the idea that new life can only come through death and
resurrection – an idea that has been around for a very long time but that was finally
given its supreme demonstration in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth.
So this is how I
see Frosty the Snowman. The story of his “creation” is a reflection of Adam.
The story of his “death” and his “resurrection” is a reflection of Jesus
Christ, the new Adam. Talk about serious themes! And yet, through it all, the
special remains a light-hearted romp especially for kids. But I think the very
simplicity of the Frosty story may allow it to bring some fundamental truths
home to us.
For example, I’ve
always wondered, even when I was a kid, about Frosty’s first words. Both times
when the hat is placed on his head and he comes to life, Frosty greets the
world with a cheery “Happy Birthday.” Now the first time, it kind of makes
sense. It is like he has just been born – his own birthday. But why does he
repeat it when he is brought back from the dead? Well, I don’t know what Romeo
Muller was thinking when he wrote it that way, but I think I can explain it
from a Christian point of view.
There is a
connection, you see, between the notion of creation and of resurrection. In our
understanding, they are not really two different things. Your hope and
expectation for the resurrection ultimately has its foundation in your
creation. The God who created you, who took inanimate matter and brought it to
life – whether you think of that creation taking place in the womb or in the
some primordial soup – is the same God who will raise your earthly remains up
to new life after you die.
That is why the
Apostle Paul makes such a close connection between Adam and Jesus Christ: “For since death came through a man, the
resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so
in Christ all will be made alive.” He means that you need to keep in mind
that your hope of life after death does not really depend on you, on anything
you have done or not done, or on anything that is in your nature. It depends
upon God. Your hope for resurrection is based in God and God’s ability to take
dead matter and bring it to life. God has shown that he can do that by creating
life in the first place and even more forcefully by raising Jesus from the
dead. There is really only one miracle – the miracle of life. And what you
received in your earthly birth or creation is like to what you will receive in
your resurrection, only it will be that much better.
And, finally,
there is one other way in which Frosty resembles Jesus. Even after Frosty is
raised from the dead, the rising temperatures mean that he can no longer remain
with his friends. He leaves to go and live at the North Pole. But he leaves
with a promise – the final words of the song: “I’ll be back again someday.” But
Frosty was not the first to say “I’ll be back.” (And, no, I’m not talking about
Arnold Schwarzenegger.) That was also Jesus’ promise after his resurrection.
And I know that, in the case of Jesus we tend to think of that return as a
cataclysmic event – something that we wait for expecting that, when Jesus
comes, he will set all things right. It is something that will happen at some
future date but that really doesn’t affect the here and now that much.
But the Frosty
special has put the idea in my mind that maybe we should think of the return of
Jesus in a slightly different way. Frosty’s return, in the special, is tied to
the date of Christmas – the date of his creation (for he was made of Christmas
snow) and the date on which he was raised from the dead. And I think that can
remind us that the resurrection of Jesus and our own resurrection which the
Bible describes as happening when Jesus returns someday, is really one event.
It is all tied up together. It’s all one and the same miracle. And it is a
miracle that we can grab hold of here and now. You don’t have to wait until you
die to start living the new life, the resurrection. Because of Jesus and the
work that he has accomplished, you can enter into that reality here and now.
“Happy Birthday” indeed!
So there you have
it. You just thought that it was a simple little children’s story. Who’d have
thought that it would turn out to be a major treatise on the meaning of
creation and resurrection. Christmas truly is a season of magic.
Frosty the
Snowman is a fairytale they say. Maybe it is, but it also contains much truth
and children know truth when they see it. Some people say that the story of
Jesus is a fairy tale too. We believe, and have reason to believe, that Jesus
was a real person. Of course, I would insist that his story is even more true
than Frosty’s, but there is also a sense in which both stories share a
universal truth about the hope for life and new life that we find in our God.
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