How To Make a Christmas Tree

Nothing says Christmas than a cartoon starring a Depression-era orphan in a shack unexpectedly getting presents from Santa Claus. Harman and Ising made one of those cartoons in The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933). And the Mintz studio did it a few years later in Gifts From the Air.

Much like in the Fleischers’ Christmas Comes But Once a Year, where Grampy invents toys from household items for kids in an orphange, the waif in this Columbia release creates a make-shift Christmas tree from things around the tumbledown home. First, a tattered umbrella.



Now, ornaments made from bubbles, including a star at the top.



A kitty cat conveniently shows up. The orphan rubs his fur to create static electricity, plugs the cat’s tail into a barrel and lights the tree. Hey, it’s better than Herman shoving a motionless Katnip’s tail into a light socket to do the same thing as in Mice Meeting You (1950). The electricity around the bubbles is hard to see in this pixilated video file.



This Color Rhapsody was copyrighted on December 22, 1936. While the official release date was January 1, 1937, a few theatres got it on their screens before then. The ad to the right is for a movie house in Ft. Worth on Christmas Day. The Ritz in San Bernadino showed it two days earlier with Bing Crosby’s Pennies From Heaven (an orphanage was in that one).

Ben Harrison came up with the story, with the animation credit going to Manny Gould. My guess is the song by a female trio as the boy is looking at toys in a shop window is a Joe De Nat original (“It’s Christmas time, it’s Christmas time, the glad time of the year. With lots of toys for girls and boys to bring them Christmas cheer” and so on). De Nat adds “O Come All Ye Faithful” and the inevitable “Jingle Bells” to the score. The cartoon ends with “Auld Lang Syne.”

The second half of the cartoon features something Columbia seems to have loved to put into its cartoons—radio star caricatures. Cantor, Bing, Bernie, Whiteman, Wynn and several others are here.

Motion Picture Exhibitor’s review of the cartoon in 1937 says “...a little boy gets a lot of fun out of some broken down toys. He prays and then believes the toys come from heaven.” Unless something has been edited in the re-release prints posted on-line, there’s no praying.

Wait a minute! What happened to the train and the elephant between scenes?



Mintz’s other Christmas time cartoon is the Art Davis-directed The Little Match Girl (1937) though there’s a Christmas sequence in the Scrappy-sans-Santa short Holiday Land (1934). (If I have missed one, leave a note in the comments).