Filmed Locally - Sharon Springs in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

By Bradley Towle

SHARON SPRINGS — It's that time of year again when people seek out their favorite holiday classics. Perhaps it's Elf, A Christmas Story, or Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Maybe you like to make the argument that Gremlins is a Christmas movie.

One film that routinely ends up on heavy rotation around the holiday season is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. The 1989 Chevy Chase vehicle remains in the zeitgeist in the form of internet memes and holiday decorations (and you probably have one uncle who likes to quote it regularly). Like most John Hughes films, Christmas Vacation is set in Chicago. In 1983's National Lampoon's Vacation, the Hughes film that first introduced us to the Griswald family, Chevy Chase's Clark plots a cross-country trip to get his family out of the Chicago suburbs on an ill-fated journey to Wally World. Schoharie County residents might take particular interest in the title sequence of the original Griswald classic. As postcards from around the country appear on screen with Lydsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road" playing over the sequence, an old postcard for Sharon Springs, a pastoral summer vision of historic Route 20, joins the parade of images.

Now it's time, dear reader, for me to reveal the most Griswald of mistakes I made in planning this article. I had put an article about the Sharon Springs postcard on hold since I learned of it earlier this year—because I mistakenly thought it was in the opening credits of Christmas Vacation, not the original 1983 Vacation. As we approached the holiday season, the time for the article had finally arrived! I cued up the opening credits of Christmas Vacation and waited for the postcard. And then I continued to wait for the postcard. I don't need to tell you it never appeared. "How could this happen, Bradley?!" you ask. I know, I know. It's so rare that I am wrong about moderately interesting trivia.

But I have an answer. My brain, that old reliable organ, associated "Holiday Road" from the first film (which I recalled playing behind the image of the postcard) with the holiday film, and so it goes. Eventually, I figured it out, and here we are. Nothing is perfect, and we all know about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Just ask Clark Griswald.