Dave Foley's The True Meaning of Christmas Specials (2002)

On December 22, 2002, CBC aired a Christmas special that was really about Christmas specials. This is a niche within a niche, but Dave Foley, co-founder of Kids in the Hall and a man who had spent the 1990s on American network television with NewsRadio, was exactly the right person to pull it off. The result, Dave Foley's The True Meaning of Christmas Specials, is one of the more genuinely strange holiday productions in Canadian television history, and it is also, against reasonable odds, quite funny.

The premise is a transparent riff on Dickens. Foley hosts his first Christmas special live from a beach, featuring surf guitar legend Dick Dale, and immediately senses something is wrong with the whole enterprise. He relocates to a snow-covered Canadian cabin that is somehow fifty feet from the beach. He falls asleep. Three ghosts visit him. You know how this goes. What you probably don't expect is that the Ghost of Christmas Specials Present turns out to be Kevin McDonald, Foley's partner from Kids in the Hall since 1984, playing a version of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come who shows Dave a future where Christmas specials have become hollow virtual experiences, entirely devoid of actual human contact. The satire lands because it was already starting to be true in 2002.

What the Special Actually Gets Right About Christmas Specials

The great Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Christmas specials that ran on American network TV from the 1950s through the 1970s had a specific texture: a studio audience, a mix of variety acts and sentimental moments, comedy skits that weren't quite fully committed to being funny, and a general sense that everyone involved was being paid well and expected to appear cheerful. Foley and his co-writers understood this format well enough to reproduce its failures faithfully.

The centerpiece parody involves Dave Thomas playing Bob Hope and Joe Flaherty playing Bing Crosby, with Foley doing David Bowie in a recreation of the legendary 1977 Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas duet. The original special, which aired weeks after Crosby died on October 14, 1977, is one of television's most improbable moments: Crosby and Bowie performing "Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy" together in a London manor house, with Bowie sporting a sweater and Crosby pretending to know who Bowie was. Foley's version alters Bowie's lyrics so that he sings "Where do the monsters go at Christmas?" and ends with the two men arguing, with Crosby repeatedly mispronouncing Bowie's name. It is mean-spirited in the way that good parody should be.

Dick Dale's presence as the opening act is the special's most inspired structural joke. Dale, the Lebanese-American guitarist from Quincy, Massachusetts, who invented surf rock by running Middle Eastern scales through a Fender Stratocaster at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach in the early 1960s, is the least Christmas-appropriate musician imaginable. That's the entire reason he's there. Foley's opening beach special is already wrong before it's even started, and Dale's propulsive, reverb-drenched instrumentals are the sound of wrongness made musical.

The Guest Problem (and Why It Doesn't Quite Matter)

The cast of The True Meaning of Christmas Specials is so specifically Canadian that it functions as a document of who was famous in Canada in 2002. Elvis Stojko, the three-time world figure skating champion who had just won his seventh national title that same year, appears as himself. El Vez, the Mexican Elvis (real name Robert Lopez, a Chula Vista punk veteran who began performing as a satirical Elvis impersonator after an unsatisfying experience at a Memphis Elvis Week in 1988), performs with his backing dancers the El Vettes. El Vez spends most of the special furious at Stojko for distracting the El Vettes' attention. The premise that a Mexican Elvis tribute act would be jealous of a Canadian figure skater at a Christmas special is not something American network television would have attempted.

Mike Myers appears as himself with Tom Green playing Thomas, his butler. Jason Priestley plays Santa Dude. Andy Richter appears as a priest. These cameos are funny precisely because they're deployed with the slightly arbitrary logic of a variety special, in which famous people appear because they were available and willing, not because they serve a dramatic function. The special is self-aware enough to make that arbitrariness the joke.

The weak spots are real. The pacing drags in the middle third, which is perhaps an honest recreation of how the genre it's parodying also dragged in its middle thirds. Some of the surreal moments are underdeveloped, reaching for absurdism without quite landing on it. The special clocks in at around an hour, and it could have been tighter at forty-five minutes.

Dave Foley and the Canadian Comedy Tradition

Foley was born January 4, 1963 in Etobicoke, Ontario. He dropped out of school at seventeen to do stand-up, met Kevin McDonald at Second City improv classes in Toronto, and the two of them eventually coalesced into Kids in the Hall with Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson in 1984. Their CBC series ran from 1989 to 1995, produced by Lorne Michaels, and it remains one of the strangest sketch comedy shows ever broadcast on North American television: committed to a kind of weird formalism that separated it from the looser American late-night sketch tradition.

By 2002, Foley was in an interesting position. NewsRadio had ended in 1999. He had done animated work, including voicing Flik in Pixar's A Bug's Life in 1998. The True Meaning of Christmas Specials feels like the work of someone who has logged enough hours in professional television to have genuine opinions about what's wrong with it. The ghost-of-specials-future sequence, showing Dave a world where Christmas entertainment is a hollow digital simulation, hit differently in 2002 than it might in a year when streaming algorithmic content has largely fulfilled that prophecy.

The special never got a proper commercial release or regular rebroadcast. It circulates in the same informal way that most cult Canadian television does, discovered by people who stumble across it and then can't quite believe it exists. On IMDB it carries a 6.6 rating from a modest number of votes, which is exactly the score a modestly funny special from 2002 that almost nobody has seen should have.