While the holidays are a time for joy and gathering with loved ones for many, for our neighbors to the north, Canada’s own The Trailer Park Boys, it’s a time to remember to smoke dope and get drunk ar
While the holidays are a time for joy and gathering with loved ones for many, for our neighbors to the north, Canada’s own The Trailer Park Boys, it’s a time to remember to smoke dope and get drunk around a campfire.
For those uninitiated, the Trailer Park Boys is a Canadian fake reality show written and directed by Mike Clattenburg. The show’s 7 seasons, and several full length movies, follow the lives of Bubbles, Julian, Ricky, and a number of other silly, sometimes offensive, but often just misguided characters as they try to live and succeed in Sunnyvale Trailer park. The show started in 2001, and reached international fame for its raunchy attitude and blatant disregard for a moral compass.
Though the boys from Sunnyvale have appeared on their last TV screen, a series of live theater shows and a web series, all using the original cast, have kept the show alive.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves – this show is dark and full of swear words and jail-able offenses, but through it all, the main characters have represented something much more. In between bong hits, liquor store robberies, and drunken fights in the trailer park, there are glimpses of a true family with as much heart as any classic sitcom family. And the Trailer Park Boys Christmas special, Dear Santa, Go Fuck Yourself, is a prime example of this mix of heart and insanity.
Dear Santa opens with many of the series’ staples. Ricky is in jail and his former lover, the mother of his child, Lucy, is trying to sleep with his best friend Julian.
We meet Lacy as she’s explaining her christmas present for Julian – a home-made mistletoe belt buckle.
Julian is working hard to make sure everyone in Sunnyvale has a beautiful Christmas, and make a little money for himself. He, Bubbles, Trevor and Cory go into mall parking lots, break into cars, and steal other people’s presents. The scheme even includes candy-cane crow bars.
“Christmas to me is about one thing, money,” says Julian as he explains one of his other Christmas scams, stealing light-strings from the rich neighborhoods, selling them to his neighbors, and offering a free (stolen) big screen TV to whichever neighbor buys the most lights from him. This is all part of Julian’s Christmas remarketing plan, presents, trees, lights, are all fair game.
Julian and Bubbles go to pick up Ricky from jail. Ricky, disappointed he wont be able to spend the holidays in jail “smoking dope and getting drunk,” begrudgingly agrees to come home after Julian says Lucy has promised to take him back.
Julian also gifts his grandmother’s car to Ricky, and it is here we are first introduced to the shitmobile – the same junk car Ricky drives for the rest of the series.
Yes, Dear Santa is actually a prequel to the series, taking place about 8 years before the first episode of the show happens.
Besides the first glimpse at the shitmobile, we also see a relatively together, mustachioed, and sober Jim Lahey, a former cop and Sunnyvale’s property manager. He’s also still married to his wife Barb.
We see Randy, Lahey’s future lover and assistant park manager, hooking for cheese burgers for the first time. “Do you like to party?” Randy asks Barb, who invites the male prostitute in an elf costume back home to get him out of the cold.
Yes, there is a lot of awful in this Christmas special. It’s certainly not a traditional take on the spirit of the season, but don’t let the shows rough exterior deter you. For every awful example of humanity, there is at least one incident sure to warm your heart.
For example, Ricky still writes letters to Santa, who he thinks is God. “I thought I fucked it up, but I just didn’t want to piss either one off,” explains Ricky to his father after being given the bad news of Santa’s nonexistence. “Great, Christmas is Fucked”
Act 3 ends with the gang inside the community church. Bubbles storms out after Ricky tries to sell hash to the priest, and Lahey stumbles in with a white garbage-bag beard and Santa hat.
“”Ricky, I’m getting out of here, this isn’t what christmas is all about – Drunk Santas with shopping bag beards…You ever stop to think what the big guy up there would think about whats going on down here,” says Bubbles with hope in his voice. It’s then that Ricky takes to the pulpit.
“What is Christmas?” Ricky asks the parishioners. “It should be getting drunk and stoned with friends and family, with the people that you love… None of this presents or lights or stress, it should be just getting stoned and drunk with the ones that you love… If you don’t smoke dope or drink, just spend time with your families.”
Ricky then tosses everyone in the church tiny sacks of weed. “The sermon makes a lot more sense if you’re stoned,” he says as he walks out to join his friend Bubbles and celebrate the holidays properly.
Back at Sunnyvale, we cut to Ricky, Bubbles and Julian together around a bonfire, all that Bubbles really wanted for Christmas to begin with. It’s during this scene we are reminded why this show is so good – it’s not just the drugs and the insults, the foul language or the moral ambiguity, it’s the knowledge that no matter what, these people love each other, and they will always be there for each other.
And that is really is the true meaning of Christmas.
Premonitions for the rest of the series are made: promises, goals, all of which are abandoned throughout the shows run. This awful show, with some of the seemingly least moral characters imaginable, repeats itself in an amazing cycle of self-destruction, but it’s the shows heart that really sticks with you.
So I hope you’re celebrating the holidays the Trailer Park Boys way. Merry Christmas to all, Dear Santa, go fuck yourself.
