Holiday Family Classics: The Thanksgiving Treasure / The House Without A Christmas Tree

I had this movie recorded on VHS transferred to dvd which started not to play right so I searched online and found this version. Glad to be able to replace the VHS version and watch it on the "smart TV" screen. Love the classic stories like this and wish more of them were available in DVD or blueray versions. Don't miss this simple but true to life story, It is a classic!!!!!

Here's a Christmas story without a stupid "leg lamp". No, this is a gentle post WWII drama about a sensitive and creative 10-year old girl. An only child, Addie lives with her crotchety widowed father (Jason Robards) and her loving grandmother in a small Nebraska home. She wants a Christmas tree, but her father refuses. We learn why. Also included on the disc is the same family in a Thanksgiving story involving Addie forming a relationship with a bitter secluded old man (Bernard Hughes) who is in a long term feud with her father. Both movies show human truths without being overly sentimental, and should be the kind of movies they show on Hallmark, but don't.

There were four Addie Mills specials made for CBS TV in the mid-1970s. This collects the first two, and the best two stories of the tetralogy.THE HOUSE WITHOUT A CHRISTMAS TREE is the first story about Addie Mills, a spirited (and slightly bossy) 10-year-old who loves school and dreams of growing up to be an artist. Her mother died when she was a few months old, and she has been raised by her loving, slightly offbeat grandmother, and her taciturn, brooding father, who doesn't seem to have much love to give to his only daughter. He forbids a Christmas tree in the house during the holidays, and Addie, who desperately wants one, thinks it's because he's so "parsimonious" (that's one of her school vocabulary words). When she wins a tree, she will withstand an explosion of emotion that will shake her to her core.THIS IS JUST ONE OF THE BEST CHRISTMAS STORIES EVER. Addie isn't the usual cute little girl character so nauseatingly passed on by every sitcom and drama of the day: she's bright, not girly, determined, but of course has her faults. Lisa Lucas plays her to a T. Mildred Natwick glows as the supportive grandmother and a great supporting cast is included, but the star of this film is Jason Robards, who provides a stunning performance as the embittered father James Mills. He could have been a soulless bastard but instead Robards permits you see this man's internal pain even as you are startled at his bitterness and anger. The late 1940s atmosphere of the story is well done--the kids even say the Pledge to the Flag correctly--and it was filmed in rural Canada to try to come as close to the setting (rural Nebraska) as possible.THE THANKSGIVING TREASURE is a little more routine. While out getting air for her bike tires, Addie meets for the first time "Old Man" Rhenquist, a crotchety elderly man who is feuding with her dad over non-payment for James Mills' digging a pond for him. A curious Addie, under cover of cutting cattails and fall plants with her best friend, discovers Rhenquist has a horse, the one thing Addie has always wanted. She persuades her best friend Carla Mae to bring the old codger some Thanksgiving dinner after hearing her teacher lecture about the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving feast, hoping to make friends (and of course get near the horse!). However, it's Rhenquist Addie comes to treasure; he's becomes like a grandfather to her, telling her tales about "the old days." The whole plot could have been terribly cliché, but Bernard Hughes as Rhenquist and Lisa Lucas as Addie rise above the cliché and make it worth watching. Again, Canadian landscape standing in for Nebraska countryside makes this look very authentic and the kids even do a radio play to cement the story in the late 1940s. Once again, the story is filmed on videotape, giving it that "soap opera" effect, but at the same time it gives it an immediacy as if you are really standing on the sidelines watching these folks.A super addition to anyone's holiday film library.

Both movies worth a look. Jason Robards [the widower dad] and Lisa Lucas [the kid at the heart of the stories] are good, but Mildred Natwick [mom/grandma] is a miracle. Thanksgiving is good but Chirstmas Tree pretty much says everything CBS wanted to say with a little less sugar and fat and a more plausible story line. This really takes a hard look back at a specific place and time and when this came out in 1972 there were way more people who could identify with it, both kids and parents, now, for the majority of us I think, this is highly indirect Americana/nostalgia. This isn’t a multiple hanky tear jerker like something from Hallmark and there are fewer characters so there’s more character development. Music doesn’t swell like something on Netflix nor is it annoyingly ever-present. Says “Two Film Collection” on my box but this wasn’t filmed, it was taped so it has that flat pallid look. Also, while it doesn’t affect the emotional impact, this is “15 years after the depression…” but there are miniature lights on trees and an artificial one [!] in the drugstore which cost “$10”. I’m a Christmas nut so stuff like this really bugs me – fake trees were experimental, rare, and would’ve been unheard of in 1940 Nebraska and miniature lights with plastic coated cords were non-existent [a single box of the type that were around – some with as few as 8 bulbs and cotton covered cords - would’ve been fabulously expensive relative to a weeks wages]. Haircuts, especially on the boys are pure 1970s and the clothes are wrong too. Exceptionally, besides Miss Natwick, the paper cut-outs used for titles and transition frames are beautiful and thoughtfully mirror the movies mood and themes.

A sweet little movie

I saw The House Without A Christmas Tree years ago and have the video of it but didn't know 'The Thanksgiving Treasure' was out there. I wanted a dvd of the first one so I searched Amazon.ca and found there was a 2nd movie and the 2 were together on the one dvd. Both are such good, wholesome, quality stories that can reach anyone and any age. I also enjoy the actors, acting and the time setting of these movies, just a bit before I was born but it brought so many memories back to me.

I had not seen this movie since I was a kid and I got to watch it some 40 years later with my 10 year old son!

Not at all what I thought it would be. Extremely disappointed. Never completely watched as I could not get into it. For me a waste of money.

A good movie to see how Ppl struggled in the 1940’s

Great movie