Wait for it

I can’t believe I’m feeling nostalgic for TV.

I mean the TV of the past, when shows aired on a schedule. A schedule that you could look up each day in a newspaper, or in the little booklet that came in the Sunday paper, or, if you didn’t read a newspaper or just wanted a lot of information about television, the TV Guide, a separate weekly magazine.

Back then, as Thanksgiving passed, we would start looking for the dates of our favorite Christmas specials: “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” even “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Sure, most of these have nothing to do with the Incarnation, and, to be honest, a lot of them demonstrate that a lot of bullying and antisocial behavior was simply accepted as a part of life in those years, but they were something to look forward to. And they were free.

Now, of course, all the specials are available on one or another streaming service, so you can watch them whenever you want. “A Charlie Brown Christmas”? It’s on Apple TV+. “Rudolph”? It’s on Apple TV too, or Amazon Prime, or Google. But it’ll cost you $7.99, above the price of your regular subscription. The original 1966 “Grinch” is free, as long as you subscribe to Peacock.

As much as I like being able to watch “The Muppet Christmas Carol” (Disney+) after decorating the tree, without having to schedule the tree around it, I’m not sure it’s a good trade-off.

Besides the fact that some families can’t or won’t pay for umpteen streaming services just to get something they used to get for free, there’s something to be said for anticipation.

The minor suffering of having to wait for something can be its own kind of joy, and increase the joy in getting it. I know I’m in a minority in my family, but I like opening Christmas gifts on Christmas, or at the earliest Christmas Eve, for just that reason. It brings me back to being a kid and running downstairs on Christmas morning to make sure that Baby Jesus had appeared in the manger and the stockings were filled and there were gifts under the tree with no tag saying who they were from because, of course, they were from Santa.

That was a tradition that went on years after I stopped believing in Santa, and one I’ve tried to maintain for our children, even if they were all too logical to believe in Santa for long.

It’s no accident, of course, that we celebrate the feast of the Incarnation — the coming of the Light of the World — just after the winter solstice, when people who have been watching and waiting as the nights have grown longer and the gloom has become more pervasive begin to see the sun spend more time in the sky and the darkness just start its retreat.

All good things — Christmas presents, sunlight, and even the Light of the World — will come in their own good time. Wait for it.