Monday, December 27, 2010

One last Christmas thought: Looking toward the future of the past

When children of today look back with fond quasi-nostalgia thirty or forty years from now about the holiday TV specials they got, they'll be recalling computer-generated high-def fare, not the herky-jerky stop-action animation my generation had from the likes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the like.


I'm sure there'll be ornaments of the characters from the specials of today like I see ornaments of those characters from those shows I recall, but likely they'll be 3-D holograms that hang off of virtual Christmas trees.

And in that future the children of today, as they approach their middle years, will tell their children tales that will seem preposterous to the youngsters of the mid-twenty-first century, like how there used to be actual trees and that at one point many parts of the northern hemisphere was covered with this blanket of snow for winter's biggest holiday. And then explain what snow was.

And somehow Trans-Siberian Orchestra will still be performing their flamboyant rock versions of traditional Christmas songs. Or, to be more accurate, their android avatars will be touring every winter, but it will be immensely popular still; irony will be forbidden by law at that point, so everyone will like all of this with an unmitigated reverence that we in this era can only appreciate when we think about how we thought about these things… when we were children.


[Didn't think I could bring that back around, did you?]

1 comment:

  1. The wife wanted me to find RTRNR on DVD, but I couldn't. I suppose I'll have to order it.

    ReplyDelete

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