Erik Brady: The Grinch may have stolen Christmas, but his tale has been giving joy for generations

Liked Christmas a lot …

Who lived just north of Who-ville,

Surely you know these opening lines of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the near-perfect children’s book later made into the near-perfect TV special.

Dr. Seuss published his masterwork just in time for Christmas in 1957. I was 3 — and totally taken with it. Our father would read it to us, complete with voices and sound effects, on cold December nights in our warm Ken-Ton colonial.

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

Now please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

Ah, yes — the reason. The title is “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” but the burning question is why. The narrator offers some theories in the book’s opening stanzas.

It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

Hearts too small — and stories too large — are the trouble with so many misguided adaptations of the Grinch. The book indicts Christmas commercialism, but Jim Carrey’s live-action movie is an ode to it. The 1966 animated version gives us a menacing Grinch, but Benedict Cumberbatch’s computer-animated variant offers a milder one. These pretenders pad out their stories to 90 minutes or two hours by introducing new characters and inventing new backstories. (We shan’t speak of the Broadway musical.)

None of those adaptations can hold a Christmas candle to the original. Seuss’ spare fable may be read aloud in 12 minutes, and the 1966 show has a run time of only double that when subtracting for the commercials. The book offers Seussian rhythm and rhyme that the ’66 show wisely uses as its own while adding simpatico songs that Seuss himself helped to write.

It so happens that Ted Geisel (his real name) met the animator Chuck Jones when they were making cartoons for the…