(and other tales of pop culture to the rescue)
I missed Elf when it released in 2003. I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since the mid-nineties, and neither Will Farrell or Jon Favreau were really on my radar. Truth be told, I don’t think I ever gave the movie a second thought.
Until I needed it.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2007, my dad had a stroke. I was planning to head over and watch the Bears game with him that afternoon when I got the call from my mom.
He lingered for another thirteen days, but passed away on December 8, 2007. I got the call from my brother shortly after getting my daughter to sleep. I’m glad she was asleep, because I promptly lost it.
Throughout my life, my dad was a steadying influence, continually seeing the good in people. If we had poor service at a restaurant, he would shut my sniping down by reminding me, “We don’t know who they had to deal with before us.” That patience and level-headedness extended to parenting, and that was the approach I did my best to model.
As a single-parent sharing custody of a seven-year old, I suddenly felt lost. I loved my mom, but it was my dad whose advice had been invaluable to me.
My ex-wife had my daughter that Christmas Eve and I wouldn’t see her until Christmas morning. Sad and profoundly alone, I experienced the holidays blues for the first time in my life. The blues eventually gave way to channel-surfing, and I landed on Elf. If memory serves, it was airing on USA Network as a round-the-clock marathon.
I can’t remember where I landed in the story, but I watched it again on the next showing. And the next. And sometime early on Christmas morning, too.
It doesn’t take a trained therapist to see why this story of a naive man-child searching for his father and trying to build a relationship with him hit me so hard. To this day, I still fight back tears throughout the last third of the movie.
That’s right. Elf made me cry. It still does.
It gave me a sense of closure at a time I needed it. It gave me magic, too. And the simple connections, all told with heart and humor, still hit me today. It’s my favorite holiday movie. And every time I watch it, I think of my dad (although, to my knowledge, he never saw it).
This wasn’t the first time that pop culture came to my rescue, either. Just a couple months before, on a weekend when my daughter was at her mom’s, I found myself watching AMC’s Halloween programming. They were marathoning the Friday the 13th movies, which I’d avoided when they were new. However, that weekend, drawing comics and watching Jason terrorize group after group of teens in a repetitive morality play, I fell in love with the slasher genre.
Comics got me through awkward junior high school phases, and The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask guided me through a post-breakup summer in high school. Stories have always helped me process my feelings. That’s probably why it’s so important for me to share that love of storytelling.
But, yeah, Elf. I’m feeling the sad coming on, and I think I’m due for some quality time with Buddy the Elf.