Season 7 Episode 12: Christmas

The third Christmas episode the series made, and the bleakest. It is framed as Al telling the story to a bartender named Ray and a row of fellow mall Santas, which tells you how it ends before it begins. Cornered into buying gifts, Al has taken twelve part-time jobs in twelve days, and the worst of them by a wide margin was the Santa gig at the Lakeside Mall. The children are the problem. One boy asks for an end to pollution and then sprays mouthwash into Santa’s mouth. Marcy turns up to sit on his lap and conduct a conversation about his personal hygiene, and Al’s reply about what she can expect from Santa is one of the most direct insults he ever handed her. Then Marcy and Jefferson organize an enormous group of children into a choir to sing a song about him. Interleaved with all this are flashbacks to Christmases going back to 1974, with the children’s height marks on the door frame, each Bundy child asking for the thing that would define them, and a running measurement showing that Al has been getting shorter since 1971. When he finally does produce presents for everyone, they are items he has removed from the bar. It is a genuinely sour half hour of television and it is one of the best things season 7 did. Watch for the uncredited eleven-year-old in the choir: it is Meghan Markle, whose father shot the series.It is also the last of the show’s genuinely ambitious Christmas episodes, and the one that leans hardest on the idea that Al’s Christmas is simply a more concentrated version of his ordinary year.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 20, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 12
• Overall episode number: 143
• Written by: Ellen L. Fogle
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: December 11, 1992
• Production note: The series’ third Christmas episode, after season 2’s “You Better Watch Out” and season 4’s “It’s a Bundyful Life.”
• Production note: The International Children’s Choir receive a Special Appearance credit. One of the uncredited children is Meghan Markle, whose father Thomas Markle was the show’s director of photography.

Guest Cast

• Dennis Cockrum as Ray the bartender
• Fred Sanders as Ishowitz
• Monty Hoffman as a Santa
• Kevin Thompson as the elf
• Ed Morgan as the charity Santa
• Matt Leavitt and Samantha Leavitt as Matt and Samantha
• Kristen Semon and Cheri Semon as Lolly and Polly
• Kristen Martin as the freckled girl
• Paula Bernard as Denise
• Sara Shearer as the assistant
• The International Children’s Choir as themselves
• Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck

Twelve Jobs in Twelve Days

The Meghan Markle cameo is the detail the episode is now best known for, and it is entirely explicable: her father Thomas W. Markle was the show’s director of photography for years, and she turns up uncredited among the choir, in a pink and white beanie and scarf, visible in the lower half of frame when Marcy has only the girls sing. She was eleven.

The flashback structure is doing real work. The height marks on the door frame date Bud to 1974 with specific months, which is more precision than the series ever gave about anybody, and the running gag underneath is that Al’s own measurement has been going the wrong way since 1971. Infant Bud asks for the same thing adult Bud asks for. Toddler Kelly wants a J.J. Walker doll.

Monty Hoffman’s Santa, who shoots the radio and then abandons a plan to watch Aladdin in favour of leaving with a woman, had appeared in season 6’s “She’s Having My Baby” as the bartender at the Paternity Ward. Matt and Samantha Leavitt are Ron Leavitt’s children and Cheri and Kristen Semon are the property master’s, all four having previously played Hubbard children in season 5’s “Kids! Wadaya Gonna Do?“

The small production details reward attention. Al is working at the Lakeside Mall rather than his usual New Market Mall, and Lakeside was the rival establishment at the centre of the season 2 Christmas episode. The box art on the kit Bud receives in Al’s dream is the same illustration used for the Wags the Perplexed Pup poster in Bud’s room back in the premiere.

Famous Quotes

• A boy on Santa’s lap: “Well, I want an end to pollution. Let’s start here!” Then, after the mouthwash: Al, “Always remember that Santa hates you.” The boy: “Yeah? What’s he going to do? Make me a shoe salesman?”
• Marcy, settling onto Santa’s lap: “Did one of your reindeer make a no-no? I’m sorry! That must be the Ghost of Foot Fungus Past.”
• Al, in reply: “You don’t have to tell Santa what you want for Christmas… But Santa says, be happy with what you’ve got: the body of a young boy.”
• Al, summarizing the fortnight: “The worst was the crummy Santa gig. I had so many knees and elbows in my groin, I thought I was in bed with the wife!”
• Al, declining an offer at the bar: “I’d get you for my son, Bud, but, uh… he wouldn’t know what to do with ya.”

Notes

• Marcy and Jefferson lead the children in a song called “Bundy, The No-Man.” Peg and the kids have their own number, “12 Days ‘Till Christmas.”
• Kelly’s gift includes a Herman’s Hermits single, three episodes after Peter Noone appeared on the show as himself in “Rock of Ages.”
• When Al offers to buy one good present for a single family member, the Bundys link arms, prompting him to complain about a united Bundy front, a phrase he had used earlier in the season in “The Egg and I.”
• The blue onesie infant Bud wears returns in season 9’s “Kelly Takes a Shot.”
• Buck is a young puppy in the 1974 flashback, which would make him eighteen in 1992 and contradicts the birth certificate seen in season 8’s “Assault and Batteries.”
• Some cable prints cut the opening scene and begin with Ray already throwing the elf out of the bar.