Thursday, December 24, 2015

Radio Greats: Crossroads of Christmas (The Family Theater)

The Family Theater, founded by Fr. Patrick Peton, CSC, to encourage family prayer (hence its still-not-forgotten tagline, "The family that prays together, stays together"), was in many ways the most successful and mainstream religious program of the Golden Age of Radio. It is not at all surprising, then, that it has a number of very good Christmas episodes.

One of these episodes is "Crossroads of Christmas", from December 17, 1952. It's from a familiar genre -- portraying the Nativity story from an outside perspective -- but it has a number of nice twists, presented in an understated way, that distinguish it a bit from other stories of that kind. It's a story of two families -- one, a family that is far from home and in need of shelter, and another, the family that lends them a bit of help, who are having difficulty with their hot-headed and anti-Roman adopted son. We know, of course, the Son of one of the families; but the real kick in the story is that we know the son of the other family, too....

You can listen to "Crossroads of Christmas" on Dumb.com in three different formats, at the Retro-OTR Podcast (note that they have spoilers in their description), or on YouTube thanks to Dennis Morrison: