It was my daughter’s notion to watch Christmas movies beginning at the first of November, but we pretty well watched all the ones that we wanted to watch by last week – even old favorites like A Christmas Story, Christmas Vacation and new favorites like Arthur Christmas. This has had the effect of Wee Jamie being perfectly happy and sociable when introduced to that weird stranger known as Santa Claus – a fat jolly man with a long white beard and a red coat trimmed with white fur. That project being successfully accomplished, we commenced on a secondary aim… to properly nerdify Wee Jamie with a watching of the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Yes, not only did my daughter and I made it a project to go see each of the movies as they launched (normally at a multiplex in Oceanside when she was still in the Marines and I came out to California to spend the holiday at my parents’ house) but I had started her off early by reading all of RR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and LOTR to her as a bedtime story when she was three … and I had read them all to my little brother Alex as well when he was about seven or eight. This was a project which took at least a year, and my little brother was so immersed in the story that he could do a very creditable voice as Sam Gamgee by the time we were done. He also dressed as a hobbit that Halloween, in a tunic and cloak, with a sword and shield by his side. (Wooden ones that Dad made for him.)

The whole four-volume epic is a great read-aloud adventure, by the way – every chapter, practically, ends on a cliffhanger. We still love the movie version, though, in spite of the mild violence done to the storyline in the interests of moviemaking. Skipping over Tom Bombadil was understandable, and Arwen had to be introduced as a character, instead of appearing out of the blue with no explanation at the very end. Faramir, unlike his brother twigged the peril of possessing the Ring almost at once, but really, was it necessary to make Denethor such an unpleasant character?

On the other hand, the visual sweep of Middle Earth was just mind-bogglingly wonderful – the pleasant, rural Shire and golden, stream-threaded Rivendell, the ancient statues looking over the river, Meduseld, the Golden Hall of Rohan, the charge of the Rohirrim before the walls of Minias Tirith, and the splendor of the White City itself. What I really liked over the course of the Trilogy was the care taken in the design of sets and props; instead of settling for a vaguely medieval-fantasy of places and folk, Peter Jackson and his designers made an obvious distinction between the various settings. The Shire was vaguely late Victorian rural cottage, Rivendell was very Art-Deco, while Rohan was early Saxon/Germanic, and Gondor classical Roman/Romanesque. I like that the distinctions were so carefully drawn and noted. This just added so much visual texture to the Trilogy.

The one thing that we both wish, as far as movie-making goes – is that Peter Jackson had decided to do movies all of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, instead of padding out The Hobbit to make three movies out of what could have been only rather long one. I get chills, just imagining what Jackson could have made of that mythic tale. The Prydain story arc could have been a series just as riveting, and with as many yearly releases as the Harry Potter epic. Ah, well – we all have our dreams, in the world of Nerddom.