Christmas in Connecticut: The Perfect Christmas Day Film

Grab that fur shrug and ditch that healthy grub! Break out the egg nog, get cozy on the couch and let Christmas in Connecticut (1945) wrap you up in good cheer.

It stars Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, the most successful homemaking magazine columnist in America. Only problem is, she has no home, no husband, no baby and she can’t cook! Like her public, the Smart Housekeeping publisher, Alexander Yardley (Sidney Greenstreet) is blissfully unaware of all this. For publicity’s sake, he forces her to host himself and a handsome war hero, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), for Christmas on her farm in Connecticut with her lovely family. This leaves Elizabeth scrambling and agreeing to marry a man she doesn’t love, John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner), but who can provide the perfect facade that her public – and boss! – expect.

Cue the zaniness as love prevails among the farm animals and rural folk of Connecticut who provide additional home-front flavor to this WWII era romantic comedy. Too unbelievable to believe you say? Well, once you see Dennis Morgan in uniform {swoon} you’ll understand why what happens, happens!

To  add to your viewing enjoyment, here’s a little cultural context for seven of the words and phrases used in this film:

1. “Give her the old magoo.” What the heck does that mean? It’s the advice  that Jones’ shipmate, Sinkewicz (Frank Jenks) gives him in the beginning of the film. The two are convalescing in a naval hospital following 18 days on a lifeboat after their ship was torpedoed. The ‘magoo’ is how ‘Sinky’ gets the nurse to give him steak dinners, whereas Jones is only getting milk. The ‘old magoo’ means turning on the charm to get what you want.

2. Felix is horrified when he see ‘Lishka’ in a mink coat. Why? For a single woman in the 1940s to have an expensive mink coat, when she herself didn’t come from a wealthy family, often meant, or was assumed to mean, that she was being kept by a Sugar Daddy. That’s why Elizabeth immediately says to her friend Felix (S. Z. Sakall), a chef and the one who’s suppling her with all the recipes she needs for her columns, “Don’t worry, I’m paying for it myself.”

3. Why is Felix talking “points” when going over his recipes? In America during WWII certain food items were rationed. There was a point system in place that allowed only so much meat or sugar, for example, per family.

4. “Every time I’d open my mouth he talked. I felt like Charlie McCarthy.” Who? Charlie McCarthy was the dummy-half of a hugely popular ventriloquist act. The human-half was Edgar Bergen, Candace Bergen’s father. Edgar & Charlie had their own successful radio program from 1937 to 1956. Think about that. A ventriloquist act…on the radio.

5. “Fat Man.” When Felix says this under his breath to Mr. Yardley it’s an inside joke with the audience. ‘The Fat Man’ was how Greenstreet’s character, Kasper Gutman, was referred to in the hugely popular film The Maltese Falcon (1941).

6. “Everything is hunky-dunky.” The slang of the day was ‘hunky dory.’ It meant everything was great. But Felix’s fractured English, tho often said with great relish, is often said wrong.

7. “Macushlah.” What kind of a name is that? It happens to be the cow’s name. And, ‘Macushlah’ – which is a lot of fun to say – is actually an Irish Gaelic term of endearment. The correct spelling is “mo chuisle,” and it literally means my pulse. It’s from a longer phrase: a chuisle mo chroi: Pulse of my heart.  As in the cow is “mo chuisle.” It gives new meaning to Elizabeth Lane’s line to Jefferson Jones about the magic of the evening they’re sharing, “Moonlight, snow…and a cow.”