Family Theater: Lullaby of Christmas

The following is transcribed. Family Theater presents Ruth Hussey, Roddy McDowell and Lois Butler. The Mutual Network in cooperation with Family Theater brings you a Christmas fantasy set in a framework of Christmas music. To tell you about our presentation of Charles Tazwell's classic lullaby of Christmas, we present Ruth Hussey.

Thank you Tony Lefrano. You know, one of the wonderful things about Christmas is the pretty web of legend, song, and story that has grown up around it without obscuring for any of us, I hope, the truth of the matter.

At another time of year, we might call the joyousness of spirit we experience an excess, but in the expansive mood that Christmas brings to everything, I'd use a more gentle word, a more generous description.

Won't you agree that the right word is abundance? I think it's out of this abundance that most Christmas fantasy springs. Out of the fact that the real truth of Christmas is so wonderful, so dramatic, so quickening to the heart and to the imagination.

And that leads us to lullaby of Christmas, which Roddy McDowell is going to narrate for us. This story is as old as Christmas, and yet is neither remembered nor told except by the the tungeless ones, the water, the wind, the rain, and the snow, by the grasses, the trees, the rocks, and the earth.

They have told the story for almost two thousand Christmas has passed, and they'll still be telling it two thousand times, two thousand Christmas to come. It will be told by a wind rustling a tree of palm or pine, or of maple or mimosa, by water as it crowds against the bank or shore of Brook, Lake, River and Ocean, and all the scattered