1971. The Waltons. “On Christmas Eve 1933, the Waltons prepare for the holiday. However, John Walton, who was forced to take work in another part of the state, has not returned home yet, and his family are becoming increasingly worried.” – IMDB

What a time to be alive. This TV movie was the pilot for the show that would begin the next year and run until 1981. Along the way in those 10 years we got to see the children grow up, the parents age, and the grandparents pass away.

I was paying attention to the opening footage and storyline, and was blown away by the production value. Once again with my tired refrain that Hollywood couldn’t do this now 50 years later on their best day!

They could put the story on film, but not the warmth and emotion. We the audience also were not so cynical and hardened that we couldn’t accept such a simple story. The human values, the Jesus story and his birth. Christmas as it was meant to be.

It was exactly the time of this movie I was castigated for not having nostalgia for The Lawrence Welk Show, and not having appreciation for its style of music. I do now, but I certainly didn’t when I was 12!

I don’t know. I don’t think I’m crazy. In fact I know I’m not. I do know that this generation’s intelligentsia is. They can’t tell a boy from a girl and think the world will be destroyed from cow farts.

They would have been looked at as aliens from another planet to be spouting that nonsense in the year this movie was set, 1933. As they would have the year this movie was made, 1971. But not today. Today they are taken seriously and we have the child mutilations to prove it. And their ‘green’ energy policies being forced on the rest.

Nope, the only thing that separated the people of 1971 from the people of 1871 was the technology, not the values. They would have recognized each other. Not so today. One of the biggest of those areas was the work ethic of 1933, to a large segment of the current generation who isn’t going to work at all.

“Earl Hamner’s two children, Scott and Carrie, are in the film as two of the children listening to the missionary lady. She is the short-dark-haired girl in a homemade hat and he is the boy with paler hair.”

The closing narration: “Christmas is the season where he give tokens of love. In that house we received not tokens but love itself. I became the writer I promised my father I would be and my destiny led me far from Walton’s Mountain. My mother lives there still. Alone now for we lost my father in 1969. My brothers and sisters, grown with children of their own, live not far away. We are still a close family and see each other when we can. And like Miss Mamie Baldwin’s fourth cousins, we’re apt to sample the recipe and then gather around the piano and hug each other while we sing the old songs. For no matter the time or distance, we are united in the memory of that Christmas Eve. More than 30 years and 3,000 miles away, I can still hear those sweet voices.”

I regret to report that the kids I knew back then through peer pressure were taught to think of The Waltons (and 3 years later Little House on the Prairie) as something incredibly “uncool” and something not to be liked (in case you were forced to watch it). Both are shows that now in my senior years I cherish. But back then something like that was unbelievably nerdy, similar to a wholesome singing group the Osmonds. I apologize for going into the culture war issues in the post, but as the point of the post was about the values then, it was the only way I could see to compare and contrast the values now.

The ‘baton’ from that era would be passed in a few years to the ‘new’ generation. The inevitable process of aging. The Homecoming was the generation that grew up in the Great Depression, and came of age during WW II. They were to a large degree “one people” in a sense. Not all of course, but the majority were white, anglo-saxon protestants. They voluntarily for example went through hardships to a degree to save sugar, or oil, or rubber, or whatever for “the war effort “. The idea that people would voluntarily suffer and do without for a larger national effort is unfathomable. Or that men would volunteer to go die for some stupid reason.

Were they a “better” generation? I’d have to say so. Were they naive? I’d have to say so. Did the people have greater character and better values? I’d have to say so. Was there crime back then? Sure. Murders? Yep. Sex crimes? You bet. Like today? No way. Demographics is destiny. And that does not bode well for this country. Since 1965 we have not been taking in people with “the habits of Liberty”. They are cultural strangers. You can’t have cultural continuity with strangers. We also created a welfare state. This movie was set in the first year of FDR’s “New Deal”. But back then they were actually work programs. Yes they got money, but it was pay for a job they performed. In the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration. Not to sit at home watching The Price Is Right and making babies with a woman they aren’t married to.