You can find a lot of things.
A long time ago there was an early post-presents Christmas morning with torn paper swept from the room and plastic trains and cardboard annuals alternately strewn into excited mess and gathered into organised piles for presentation.
Onto the television in this room which was lit with pleasantly pale December sunlight, sieved first by the clouds and second by the curtains that still were drawn, came a stop-motion animated short that did not run longer than 10 minutes.
The short was very quiet.
It did not, as far as the memory of this room in the morning recalls, have a voice.
The scene, and there was only one: a large pond of ice, surrounded by snow, at its centre a snowy hillock, or a tree, or the latter atop the former. Perhaps the hillock is hollow, or is later shown to be.
It is, anyway, silent, and nothing at all happens, until cotton snow begins to fall, or a cotton snow bauble begins to melt and falls from the tree, and it finishes melting, and when it finishes melting out of it is born a very small elf.
This continues to happen, and continues to happen slowly, with cotton and crinkled clingfilm and loving care to the movement of the figures.
The rest is not so clear. At some stage, I am certain: there is a mammoth. Melted out of the snow mound. Perhaps he is helped out of it by the elves.
I would like to say that, later, a Christmas Man, a silent Saint Nick, is melted twinkling out of the snow, or made from it; but do not become stuck: that may be fiction.
The rest is not, though poring over online archival TV listings does not attest to these things’ reality.
The animation: maybe mainland European, or at least, it might reasonably be guessed from the style and from the silence of its figures.
The something tree?
You can find a lot of things, and I have: the cartoon with the cats noise that haunted me, and the Ub Iwerks number with ‘Spooning in a Spoon’ (from first a black VHS anthology and years later watched in Hide and Seek while Robert De Niro becomes suspicious of the neighbours), and Elmer the Elephant, and a Sporcle quiz with the themes from The Snorks and The Raccoons. The National Geographic special on Australia, remembered music bringing slightly alive a marrow set at such a far time past.
This, though, from Christmas morning, long ago, I have not ever found.
dead lost beaches 