Tune in Tonight: "The Cabbage Patch Kids First Christmas"
As our country continues its train ride into Hell, driven by a conductor who speaks in an inscrutable word salad, much like the Man From Another Place in Twin Peaks, it’s important to keep in mind that the concept of #MAGA, that dream world our President and his most ardent supporters speak about, never really existed. There’s never been a time when everyone had a Cadillac in their driveway, and people (wink) knew their place (nudge). The rich have always dominated the poor, teenagers have always been having sex, women have always been getting abortions, and the gays have always been gay. Other than the fact that you can now send a picture of a dancing hot dog to someone within less than a second, the world hasn’t changed all that much.
Remember Christmas a few years ago, when we all looked askance at parents who went to insane lengths to buy Hatchimals, the media hyped “hot toy” of the year? People lined up outside of stores before dawn, got into fistfights with each other over the last one, and paid up to ten times the price to predatory opportunists online.Now? You can get them for $20 at Big Lots. They can’t get rid of these things. But, it’s okay, as long as the rest of us who didn’t participate in such nonsense can smirk in satisfaction and judgment over what parents today will do in order to appease their spoiled brats.
But, here’s the thing (and I know that most people know this, but seem to conveniently forget it in favor of smug superiority): this exact same thing happens every few years, and has for decades. Before that, there was Tickle Me Elmo. Then there were Furbies, then Tamagotchis, and then Tickle Me Elmo again, for the first time. Before any of that, however, there were Cabbage Patch Kids.
Cabbage Patch Kids were the creation of Xavier Roberts, a whole 21 years old when he first came up with the idea. Cleverly combining quaint folklore with the natural human desire to own the only one of anything, Cabbage Patch Kids were marketed as one of a kind dolls that were “adopted” rather than bought (though, as with real life adoptions, money definitely had to change hands somewhere in the process). So ugly they were cute, the lumpy faced Kids all had charmingly quirky names like Jebediah Willie or Lulu Christabelle, and people went fucking apeshit over them. Stampedes and violent fights broke out as thousands of customers converged on stores that only carried a couple hundred of the dolls at a time. I had a couple, and if you’re a woman who born anytime between 1970 and 1980, you almost certainly did too, and your parents probably went far out of their way to get them. So perhaps we should lay off the guy who blew half a paycheck on eBay because his kid wanted a hedgehog Webkinz, yeah?
ANYWAY, a millionaire before he was thirty, Xavier Roberts naturally wanted to keep that money train a-rollin’, and he did so by licensing his creation for board games, cereal, diapers, books, clothes, piggy banks, lunchboxes, jewelry, cameras, video games, cassette players, and expensive porcelain collectibles, among several hundred other items. Naturally, there was a holiday special too, The Cabbage Patch Kids: First Christmas, a largely forgotten spoonful of hot mush that aired in 1984, when Cabbagemania was still at its peak.
It opens with a brief overview of the titular Kids’ origins provided by Colonel Casey, a friendly talking stork. They’re born in an enchanted place in the mountains of northern Georgia, where “bunny bees” sprinkle magic crystals on cabbages to bring them to life (they start as merely heads nestled in cabbage leaves, a horrifying visual reminiscent of Farmer Vincent’s “garden” in Motel Hell). The Kids were discovered by Xavier, a 10 year-old boy who, for whatever reason, speaks with the voice of a man in his twenties. The fact that, up until Xavier found them, no one knew of a place where children burst fully formed out of produce leads one to ponder what happened before that, and what extreme measures the kids had to resort to in order to survive, such as foraging for nuts and berries, or eating the bunny bees.
After telling the Kids about “the Christmas spirit,” and how one needs to go to a city in order to truly experience it, Xavier promptly abandons them to return to his own home, leaving them to fend for themselves in a shack out in the middle of the woods. Determined to find out more about this mysterious Christmas spirit, the Kids set out entirely on their own on a trip to the city, which doesn’t seem to alarm Colonel Casey in the slightest. Before they get there, though, the Kids are almost accosted by the awesomely named Lavender McDade, an evil elderly woman, and her henchmen, Cabbage Jack, a rabbit in overalls, and Beau Weasel, a weasel wearing a suit and a bowler hat. Lavender wants to kidnap the Kids and force them into child labor, searching for gold in an underground mine. The Kids narrowly escape, however, and hitch a ride to the city on the back of a truck.
Once they arrive and begin their search for the Christmas spirit, the Kids encounter a series of increasingly depressing holiday tableaux, including a trio of pickpockets determined to recruit them (puzzlingly, the pickpockets look and sound exactly like Lavender and her gang, but are entirely unrelated characters), a childless woman who is so emotionally overcome by their adorable little potato faces that she weeps in despair, and an orphaned (and crippled, no less) little girl named Jenny, who, left alone in an orphanage, makes a Christmas tree out of a coat rack.
Not to be daunted, the Kids, who don’t exist for any other reason except to solve people’s problems and spread joy and optimism, decide that they’re going to get a holiday miracle two-fer in by bringing together Jenny and the childless woman. Their reasoning for this is both convenient and hilariously superficial–Jenny bears a strong resemblance to Paula Louise, one of the Kids, so surely the woman would want to adopt her on the spot.
Meanwhile, the pickpockets are hot on the Kids’ trails, their leader a modern day Fagin who’s bent on getting these gnome-like humanoids to do her foul bidding. They manage to steal Jenny away for roughly fifteen seconds or so, before the police catch up with them. Conveniently, this all happens directly across the street from the hotel where the childless woman and her husband are staying, just as they’re walking out the front door. The couple immediately agrees with the strange, not quite earthly looking children they’ve only met once before that adopting Jenny is a great idea, and a police officer hands her over to them like a sack of laundry, without even getting their names or address. Not only that, the couple also decides right then and there that, what the heck, they’ll adopt Paula Louise too. Because that’s how adoption works, you see–it’s like when you’re buying a hamster at the pet store, then spontaneously decide to buy another one, so the first one won’t be lonely and try to chew its own foot off.
The other Kids are sad to see Paula Louise go, for a moment. But it’s fine, because a replacement Kid is born the very next day, and Paula Louise is presumably forgotten. Somehow, this all has something to do with Christmas.
I remain torn over the question of what to expect from a twenty-two minute long children’s holiday special, particularly one that was made solely to capitalize on a popular toy. It’s also entirely possible that, given current events, I was in the wrong frame of mind to enjoy this program. But for goodness sake, they couldn’t have ended the show with the childless couple just meeting Jenny at the orphanage, implying that they would eventually adopt her? There’s something grossly oversimplified about someone adopting an orphan mostly because she looks like another child, let alone choosing a second child as a sort of buy one, get one free deal. To portray human adoption as similar to adopting a puppy from a pound based strictly on how cute it is, and not whether it would be a good fit for your household (which is exactly how anti-adoption advocates portray it), leaves a startlingly bad taste in one’s mouth, much more than you’d expect from an otherwise paper thin, perfectly harmless cartoon.
Nevertheless, adoption is part of the Cabbage Patch Kids(tm) brand, so I guess we have to let it slide. For a Christmas special, The Cabbage Patch Kids is curiously thin on Christmas, with no mention of Santa Claus or allegories for Jesus Christ. Like Die Hard, it’s not that it’s about Christmas, it just takes place during Christmas. It’s a cobweb of a plot just barely holding up an extended commercial for dolls, and it certainly served well in that capacity. Cabbage Patch Kids would continue their reign for another few years, and even landed on a postage stamp representing 80s pop culture. They’re still around, albeit without enjoying the “hot holiday toy” resurgence that Tickle Me Elmo did. You can just walk into any Target right now and buy one, without having to punch a single person in the face. That is the true Christmas miracle.
Original airdate: December 7th, 1984
