User Reviews

This starts out with a very busy architect coming home with Christmas gifts to find his wife and young daughter had left him on December 23rd. The wife was tired of being neglected. The husband was supposed to take their daughter to see Santa Claus so she could ask him for a puppy.

For some reason, the wife and daughter stop off at a hotel in the late afternoon and go to bed while it's still light out (a travel clock shows about 5:30) on their way to stay with the wife's sister. The daughter is worried about Santa finding her. The husband drives all night searching for them and does manage to find them, but only sits in the car.

When the wife wakes up, the daughter is missing - this is where Dan Matthews and the Highway patrol come in. The husband is brought in for questioning as a suspect. The highway patrol finds a young girl's handkerchief with what appears to be blood on it.

The girl shows up at a Salvation Army shelter because of the Santa Claus bell ringer. She's holding a small dog with a wounded paw. Somehow, she found a blanket to wrap the dog with. Santa brings her inside the shelter and feeds both her and the dog some soup and that's where Dan Matthews finds her and reunites the family.

A man comes home one evening from work on December 23 to find a note from his wife, Laura, telling him she's leaving him to visit her sister for Christmas, and taking their 6-year-old daughter Julie. She doesn't state she's leaving him forever, only that she doesn't want him to come-she wants some time away from him.

We see the mother and daughter in a car as they are about to check into a motel en route to their destination. She tells the daughter that Daddy (an architect) is too busy to be with them, he's busy at work. We later learn that he had promised to come home early from work that day to take Julie to see Santa Claus but instead didn't leave work until evening and never even phoned.

Next we see Dan getting word about a missing girl. Laura woke up on the 24th and Julie was gone and couldn't easily be found. She tries to sugar coat her reasons for not being with her husband for Christmas but Dan gets her to reveal her troubles, telling her it's quite important to discovering what happened to Julie.

It is learned early on that Laura's husband, Ted's car was seen by the never-sleeping motel manager about 3 a.m. Outside the motel parking lot. He was picked up, but not questioned by Dan until sometime later. Another patrolman found a blood-stained handkerchief identified by Laura as her daughter's in a field not far from the motel. Sometime later, the lab reports that it was blood-but from a dog.

When Dan does get to talk to Ted, he is convinced that his story about searching most of the night for his family, then finding their motel, but deciding not to burst in on the pair in the middle of the night, and then just driving around trying to figure out what to do is the truth. He takes Ted to the motel, figuring it'll be good for the couple to talk things out.

At this time, he learns that Julie had written a letter to Santa Claus that they all just learn is not on the dresser in the motel room as Laura had thought. They now figure she got up and wanted to take it right to Santa.

We viewers see Julie carrying a dog, wrapped in a blanket, approaching a bell-ringing Santa outside a mission. She goes up to him and the kind man immediately takes her inside the mission for some soup, trying to learn who she is. Julie gets upset that Santa doesn't seem to know her or where she lives. The man goes to get some change to phone the highway patrol, when a patrol car with Dan comes up and when he tells her about the girl, Dan insists he go with them to reunite the family. He does and all is well.

In reading IMDB about this episode, the oddest thing is that this aired as the 39th episode of the series' first season-on June 25, 1956. Immediately, we wonder what TV producer wants to air a Christmas episode six months away from Christmas. I do not know for certain but do have a thought: I see that the air dates for those first-season episodes show one aired on December 19, and the next one aired on January 2. When series were producing 39 episodes a year, they typically took about a week to rehearse and film each episode. They could not possibly take much longer because they would have never been able to have a new show ready each of the 39 weeks, not even if they filmed year-round, which they did not wish to do.

Networks did not always have specials, such as Christmas or others, planned for a specific air date and time all that well in advance. They may well have had a special planned to air sometime in, say, late December and Highway Patrol producers may have received word too late that their show would not air on December 26. Perhaps this episode was filmed not too long before that date and they couldn't get all the post-filming production completed to air it on December 19, so they had to go with the episode planned for that date.

A second reason why it didn't air in December is that a special news event could have preempted programming on December 26.

This could have left them with their Christmas episode not able to be aired before the new year began, so they decided to just save it for later, and then tacked it on at the end of the TV season.

A third possibility is that it was decided at a late date to air a rerun on December 26, and it was too late to get the Christmas episode to run the week before, forcing the same delay suggested earlier.

These seem the only logical reasons why this episode aired six months after Christmas.

Otherwise, it was a decent episode-I give it a 7.

I watched this episode this morning with 2019 eyes and realized how far we've come from the '50s. Matthews "advises" the mother about her marital situation. Several references to the Bible, etc. Although Christmas is the theme, today unfortunately; it wouldn't air.