Review of Christmas Comes But Once a Year

This is a vintage short animation that's sweet and heartwarming as only a Fleischer cartoon could be, I find it to be one of the great offerings from the studio that actually wasn't something dark and bizarre! It quickly sets up really well just what kind of gloomy threadbare Christmas the orphans are having in what must either be an orphanage with a very mean and stingy matron or one that's fallen on hard times. There's so many little details, like the pitiful battered old Christmas tree, how the kids are all wearing such ill-fitting nightgowns, how there's no fire in the fireplace, and it really gets you when the shoddy reject toys they've received fall apart in their little hands one after another as they try to play with them - and then they all start bawling! But then along totters the lovably eccentric old coot and tinkerer of all things from the more tame Betty Boop shorts Professor Grampy, who hears their cries from outside and immediately takes action and basically breaks entry and wrecks the place as he gets into a serious roll of ingenious creativity as he cobbles together new makeshift toys for the children out of pretty much everything that's laying around to give them a Christmas they can actually enjoy while laughing to himself like a classic mad inventor. He dresses himself like Santa as he gives them their new gifts and even devises a way to give them indoor snow! Some of the patchwork toys look a little on the hazardous side but I really love what I see as the message of his short, that you don't need a lot of flashy presents to have a great Christmas but that the real worth and spirit of the holiday is something that comes from the heart and is in the act of giving. Those kids don't know that they're basically playing with junk, it doesn't matter, they just see toys that work, and there's something beautiful about that to me. This is one of the best Christmas-themed old animated shorts that I've seen, and it's a wonderful little charmer for sure. Watching it gave me that old Christmas cheer again, lovely. Merry Xmas everybody!!! X