Why does Santa Claus give toys? Did he have a reason for growing that beard? And where'd that red suit come from? The Rankin/Bass special premiered on ABC in 1970 and comes up with increasingly inventive answers as to how Mr. Claus came to be the man pop culture knows today. A baby bearing only a nametag named Claus is raised by elves named Kringle who teach him how to make toys, and he soon uses the talent to cheer up the children of Somberville, who have been forbidden to own playthings by the ruler Burgermeister Meisterburger (that'll get the kids giggling). Actor Paul Frees, the voice of Burgermeister Meisterburger, was also the pipes behind Meisterburger's henchman Grimsley, a newsreel announcer, the penguin Topper, and all of the Kringle brothers, among other characters.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
