Family Theater: Lullaby of Christmas

The following program is cancelled. From Hollywood, 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 Hussy.

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 Radi McDowell is going to narrate for us. This story is as old as Christmas, and yet is neither remembered nor told except by the tongueless 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 2,000 Christmas' past, and they'll still be telling it 2,000 times, 2,000 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 seven seas by rain, tiptoeing across the roofs and skylights of every building north, east, south and west of Greenwich, by the singing grasses of southern Pampus, Bush and Savannah,