By Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist Published Nov 30, 2009 at 7:00 AM
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You'll see plenty of on-air promos for the big network Christmas specials, old and new, over the next month.

But  there are little gems I wait for each year, hoping they pop up somewhere on the long list of cable channels. My TV wish list includes "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol," "The Homecoming" and "The House Without a Christmas Tree."

"Mr. Magoo's" version of the Charles Dickens tale is the oldest of the network animated specials, debuting in 1962 on NBC with a musical score written by the Broadway duo of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. The ghost of Christmas Yet to Come scared the heck out of me when I first saw it on the black-and-white set in our living room.

Then there's "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story," the 1971 pilot for "The Waltons." This Depression tale has rougher edges than the sometimes saccharine TV show that followed, and had a slightly different cast including Patricia Neal in the role of Olivia, played by Michael Learned.

Another lost stocking stuffer is "The House Without a Christmas Tree," a simply produced 1972 Christmas story set in a small Nebraska town in 1972 and originally airing on CBS. A young girl raised by her kindly grandmother, played by Mildred Natwick, and grumpy dad, Jason Robards Jr., wants a tree. Her dad, of course, doesn't.

They're all available in DVD. But I always hope I'll happen upon them on the screen, even though I don't see them on any schedules.

What are you waiting to watch this Christmas season?

Whether it's Chevy Chase's "Christmas Vacation" or the cheesy technicolor wonderfulness of "White Christmas," or even an episode of a favorite sitcom, share your list of what you want to see on TV this holiday season. 

Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist

Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.

A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.

In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.

When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.