The House Without a Christmas Tree

The House Without a Christmas Tree (1972)

A young girl named Addie, living in Nebraska in 1946 wants nothing more for the holidays than a Christmas tree, but her widowed father, is bitter and refuses due to events from the family's past.

Date of release
1972-12-03
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Drama, Family, TV Movie
Director
Paul Bogart
Collection
Addie Mills Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

The House Without a Christmas Tree is a 1972 television movie, novelized into a children's book by Gail Rock in 1974. It depicts the relationship between Addie Mills, a bright and energetic only child, and her melancholy father, who never recovered from the death of his wife and forbids having a Christmas tree in the house. The videotaped production was seen regularly on CBS during the holiday season between 1972 and 1977.

Production

Originally shown on CBS on December 3, 1972, this movie was actually a very low-budget film produced on videotape instead of 35mm film. John J. O'Connor, the television critic for The New York Times, highly praised the program. In his review, O'Connor observed that "what could have been cloyingly sticky was kept, in an unusually sensitive script by Eleanor Perry, gently perceptive.

Once again, O'Connor was impressed with the program. In his review, he wrote "this time around, Addie took her classroom Thanksgiving lesson seriously enough to attempt friendship with one of her father's old enemies, an elderly misanthrope living as a recluse on a nearby farm. After a slow beginning, dawdling too long around school scenes, the hour settled effectively and touchingly on the central relationship of the story.

Each act of the story featured collages that opened and closed it between commercial breaks. The collage artist who assembled these for the story, Norman Sunshine, won an Emmy Award for them. He later assembled other collages for The Thanksgiving Treasure.

The House Without a Christmas Tree was filmed in Uxbridge, Ontario, mainly at the corner of Peel Street and Victoria Drive, where the house and school still exist. They also shot near the downtown core at Church and Brock Street West.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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