I Hate the Whos, Too.

This kids and I were watching “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” a few days ago. It wasn’t on tv or anything, we just watched the video tape we’ve had banging around for the past few years. (I don’t think children today really get the wonder of watching a show or a movie any time you want to. We had to wait until it showed up on network tv, and if you happened to miss it that particular night, tough luck, sucker, you had to wait a whole year to catch it again. Now we can watch “The Wizard of Oz” or “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown” all summer if we want. And we have.)
Watching the Grinch this time brought up a few questions in my mind that hadn’t occurred to me before. Like, if the Grinch is, in fact, THE Grinch and there are no others, where did he come from? Is he a separate species from the Whos or is he just a genetic mutation? He looks like the unholy love child of Yoda and Bea Arthur.

How does he get groceries up on Mount Crumpet, anyway?

I always felt so sorry for Max the Dog when I was a little kid. It seems to me that he didn’t like living with a Grinch, why didn’t he just up and leave? Was he suffering from a canine equivalent of Battered Woman Syndrome? Or was he worried that the Whos would kill him and eat him? After all, the exact origins of the Roast Beast was never determined. (In that vein, how do we know the Roast Beast isn’t one of the last surviving Grinches? Maybe the Grinch has a very legitimate reason to hate the Whos after all.)

I’m with the Grinch on the noise thing, by the way. If I had to listen to all that banging and shrieking and rattling and thumping for 53 years, I’d be in a roaring good snit, too. And the singing. Plus, having your shoes too small is a definite mood-killer.

Cindy Lou Who is a remarkably composed child to find Santa in her house and not even bat an eyelash. Man, I don’t know a single child that wouldn’t have screamed the house down. I mean, finding any stranger, let alone Santa, in your living room would give one quite a turn, I’d imagine. Also, I know the Grinch came down the chimney, but there seems to be some serious security issues in Who-ville, they may want to address that.

So, after they welcomed the Grinch into Who-ville and let him carve the Roast Beast, did he have to go back up to Mount Crumpet and live out his days in squalor and loneliness? And now that he’s nice, does he have to change his name and adopt an entirely new identity? Because he’s still green and furry, where the Whos are decidedly not; it’s not like he’s going to blend in.

See, maybe I was better off just watching it once a year.