Rod Serling, Born on Christmas 100 Years Ago, Gave Us an Enduring Yuletide Gift
A 1960 ‘Twilight Zone’ episode, ‘The Night of the Meek,’ stars ‘The Honeymooners’ Art Carney as an alcoholic department-store Santa who experiences a miracle.
Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah are falling on December 25 as does the 100th birthday of Rod Serling. Among America’s most influential writers, Jewish like the Child of Bethlehem, his legacy includes a holiday gift: “The Twilight Zone” episode “The Night of the Meek.”
“I was a Christmas present,” Serling said of his birthday, “that was delivered unwrapped.” When I interviewed the writer’s daughter, Anne Serling, about her memoir, “As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling,” she described how her father marked the Yuletide season.
Serling took pride in decorating his house with festive lights. As they twinkled, Ms. Serling and her father would gather around the TV to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” With its supernatural theme and social commentary, the film might have been one of Serling’s own screenplays.
Enjoying “The Night of the Meek” was a tradition for the whole family. The episode, first aired in 1960, stars “The Honeymooners’”Art Carney, as an alcoholic who experiences a Christmas miracle. Serling, until his passing in 1975, gathered his wife, Carol, with Anne and her sister, Jodi, each year to watch it.
“This is Mr. Henry Corwin,” Serling informs the audience in the show’s opening narration, “normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely popular American institution, that of the department-store Santa Claus.”
We meet Cowin, already drunk, sitting on a bar stool that seems to fit him far better than his greasy Santa Claus suit. Two beaming children press their noses to the bar’s windows, earning double-handed waves from the “ersatz Santa Claus,” as Serling describes him.
Once the children are out of sight, Corwin downs another shot. “Why,” he asks twice, “isn’t there a real Santa Claus for kids like that?” He’s speaking to the bartender, but looking into the camera, so that he is also posing the question to the audience at home.
Corwin stumbles out into the snow, reeking of booze even through the screen. Two children from the tenements rush to greet him, believing he’s the genuine St. Nick. They ask for toys, but also for things wealthier children take for granted like a Christmas dinner and “a job for my daddy.”
The flawed Santa Claus embraces the kids and begins to weep. With nothing to give, he heads to the department store for his shift, where the boss berates him for being late and calls him a wino. With a long line of children waiting, Corwin takes his seat, only to slip and faceplant onto the floor.
“Look, Mom,” young Percival Smithers says. “Santa Claus is loaded.” When the boss fires Corwin, the “ashamed” Santa explains that he can either drink or weep. He says that someone should remind Mrs. Smithers, who rejects his apology, “that Christmas is more than barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way.”
Christmas, Corwin says, “is another thing finer than that — richer, finer, true — and it should come with patience and love, charity, compassion.” He laments the homes where “the only thing that comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve is more poverty” and hunger.
Corwin wishes that “on one Christmas — only one,” he could really be Santa Claus, and bring a bag of toys for “the hopeless ones and the dreamless ones.” Just once, he says, “I’d like to see the meek inherit the earth.”
While this line is being delivered, the camera holds on a young boy. He stands out in the TV shows of the time because he happens to be Black. Serling was sending a message, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, that segregation was incompatible with “good will to all men.”
Jingle bells pealing from the tenements alert Corwin that the supernatural is afoot. He discovers the means of achieving his wish, which is to ease the gnawing want of those in need. The episode plays out with an inspiration that sets it apart from darker “Twilight Zone” outings.
Ms. Serling told me via email that she’s “trying to process” that her father “would be 100 years old,” calling it “unimaginable.” She’s “touched by the people who have reached out to me and to those who acknowledge his works. My dad would have been so honored by their kindness and warmth, as am I.”
Kindness and warmth are themes found in the closing narration of “The Night of the Meek.” There is “a wondrous magic to Christmas,” Serling says, “and there’s a special power reserved for little people. In short, there’s nothing mightier than the meek — and a Merry Christmas to each and all”— a message of love from a Jewish writer who was delivered, unwrapped, on the day of Christ’s birth.
