Welcome to the 2025 Heistmas Advent Calendar, a daily drop of pop culture Christmas icons, oddities, and joy. Check back every day from now through December 25 for each daily entry!
In 1987, stop-motion animation legend Will Vinton released A Claymation Christmas Celebration into the world, and some point not too long after that, my grandmother taped it off television. That meant it found its way into the regular rotation of Christmas programming in our family, which of course means I now have several hyperfixations built around it.
For those who might not know: Claymation Christmas is an anthology TV special featuring several unrelated Christmas musical segments, all hosted by a pair of bickering dinosaurs, all done in Vinton's signature "Claymation" style, which is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone's who seen the special remembers their favorite segments -- mine was "We Three Kings," featuring doo-wop-singing camels wearing tennis shoes -- but if there's one section of this show that's endured above the others, it's, of course, the one featuring singing raisins.
They haven't been around in a long time, but if you were a kid watching TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s you absolutely could not escape that California Raisins. Created by an ad firm with the support of the California Raisin Advisory Board (lots of party people at the California Raisin Advisory Board), they debuted in 1986 as, basically, a Motown group made up of singing raisins. By '87, they were everywhere, so naturally they made their way into this special for a rendition of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" that is, sincerely, good as hell.
The 1980s were an incredible time for random licensing agreements that inserted just about any fictional character into children's television. We had a Rambo cartoon and a RoboCop cartoon, for crying out loud. But there's just something especially delightful to me about fictional spokesmen for, of all things, raisins, popping up in this Christmas special for kids and absolutely crushing it. These little stop-motion avatars of Capitalism brought the house down with their "Rudolph," and it's one of those weird combinations of '80s pop culture stuff that we'll probably never see again.
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