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A story of two very different Christmas gifts from the M*A*S*H cast to the crew
Sneak a peek behind the scenes of Christmas on the M*A*S*H set!
Watching Christmas episodes of popular TV shows gives audiences something special to look forward to at the end of every year. It's good to know that behind the scenes of favorite M*A*S*H episodes like "Dear Dad" or "Dear Sis" or "Death Takes a Holiday" that the crew was getting the same treatment, every year looking forward to a special gift from the stars of the show to everybody who worked so hard on the groundbreaking show.
According to M*A*S*H writer Ken Levine, these gifts could be quite nice, and in his blog, he remembered fondly one year that the cast bought watches for the whole crew.
Not only were the watches beautiful timepieces, but Levine said they had them engraved with M*A*S*H to commemorate the time these crew members spent on the show. No doubt, it was one of the more special keepsakes the crew received while filming the show.
Hearing rumors of these gifts, one story editor, Levine recalled, found himself feeling like a child on Christmas morning, excited to see what the cast would give to crew members on his first year on the show. Well, everybody knows that Christmas gifts come in two forms: highly covetable and highly sentimental, and it turned out that the story editor showed up during a Christmas when the stars of M*A*S*H were feeling more of the latter.
So, it wasn't anything quite as shiny as a watch that the crew unwrapped that year. Levine wrote, "Over the course of years, so many M*A*S*H cast members sang songs in various episodes that one season they put together an album compilation of them and gave that to us as their Christmas present." This undoubtedly was a treasured gift on set for long-term crew members, but Levine described the disappointment of the story editor who'd just walked on set to receive what Levine called "a cheesy vinyl album featuring the song stylings of Jamie Farr and Harry Morgan."
While the charming compilation record may not have been exactly what the story editor had on his Christmas list that year, that vinyl album no doubt would have delighted any of M*A*S*H's many fans to have found under the tree. (Especially if it included Hawkeye's melancholy version of "I'll Be Home for Christmas" from season two.)
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