This is the conclusion to a multi-part article series running from November 1 to December 27. It discusses the themes and meaning of Christmas movies, digs into specific tropes, and unpacks the true nature of Christmas. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth essays can be found here.
I was always disappointed as a kid how quickly Christmas went away. The holiday lasts two or three months anticipating a climax, resulting in a fury of torn wrapping paper, warm drinks, and leftover ham in the fridge. Unfortunately, it’s over all too quickly. I wake up on December 26 to melting snow, a long drive home, cardboard boxes awaiting being shuffled back into the storage locker, and my boss expecting me to arrive on time. And worst of all, nobody wants to talk about Christmas for another 10 months. For the Christmas junkie, it all feels too cold and abrupt.
This hasn’t always been the case. Historically, Christmas was always celebrated as part of larger liturgical seasons. Advent lasted from December 1 to 23, followed by the 12 days of Christmas, multiple major feast days, Candlemas, the Feast of the Epiphany, and a few-week celebration before Lent began in February. Christmas celebrations were intended to run through February 2 as a payoff for three weeks of fasting and quiet self-reflection during Advent, as the birth of Christ was certainly something to be festive about.
The rapid dropoff of modern Christmas is anachronistic to the modern understanding of Christmas, with its heavy focus on consumer spending and secular feelings. Modern Christmas has completely inverted the practice of the holiday to its detriment. As the novelist and historian, Ace Collins writes:
“When most societies were rural, few people worked in the dead of winter. It was a time when many were spending long, dark days inside their homes, looking forward to winter’s shill giving way to the spring thaw. So devoting a dozen days to prayer, reflection, and attending church was not a huge undertaking. Yet with the coming of the Industrial Age and the regular year-round work schedules it brought, finding time to continue activities that had been traditionally associated with the 12 Days of Christmas.”
There have been attempts to revive the original practices of the 12 Days of Christmas. Recently, marketing specialists and Christan bloggers Chris and Glencora Pipkins published a lovely devotional Twelve Tide: Recovering a Season of Giving, Feasting, & Reflection, which turns December 24 to January 4 into a season of worship, gift-giving, reading, and spiritual reflection.
“We really do believe that this method of celebrating Christmas enhances the joy and meaning already present in the season, elevating the practice of reflection and gift-giving, while reducing stress and consumerism. At the same time, of course, we recognize that this is not the only way to enjoy Christmas; the twelve-day model gives us a framework upon which we can improve.”
Why Can’t Christmas Be Everyday?
Regardless, Christmas tends to end on December 26 precisely because people want it to end. Christmas is a stressful time for most people. It’s expensive, exhausting, requires submitting oneself to annoying family members, and adds more stress than it is worth for many people. Most people simply don’t want to hear about Christmas cheer or the reason for the season for another 11 months.
Whether you like it or not, the fact that Christmas has an end date is still a good thing. It is that finality that gives Christmas its meaning. In Disney+’s The Santa Clauses, the villain of the first season is a bumbling Silicon Valley tech bro with big ideas and poor execution. He wants to use Santa’s magic to revolutionize Amazon’s same-day delivery and turn every day into Christmas, but doing so destroys the world’s Christmas spirit, and all Santa’s elves disappear without it.
Distinctiveness is the thing that makes Christmas special. Just as Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas cannot become Santa Claus because he isn’t Santa, Christmas is not the rest of the year. The year is anchored to different holidays that celebrate different emotions, and different parts of human life. They are just as important as Christmas. Easter, Independence Day, Veteran’s Day, and Halloween are distinctly themselves and deserve their own time precisely because they are vital. We need days to celebrate different emotions, life and death, and those who sacrifice for us. We need days to party and days to soberly reflect.
Christmas is Incarnational and Vital
Christmas itself is an incarnational holiday, both in its intended celebration and in the supernatural air surrounding the holiday. Among Christians, it is the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. And as with all orthodox teachings, a proper understanding is necessary to truly reflect on the strangeness and the reality of that mystery.
As journalist Andrew Ferguson writes:
“In the early church, Christians replaced the baptism of Jesus as the preeminent celebration of the season because it stood as a happy rebuke to the Manicheans. Believing as they did in the absolute division of spirit and matter, no group of heretics has ever been gloomier. The celebration of Christmas was a way of telling the world: This really happened, to a real mother and a real child, made in flesh and blood, the coming together of God and man.”
The Incarnation is just the first part in that story and the Liturgical Calendar reflects that. Christmas is just the start of the year. Literally within Christianity, each calendar year starts with the first day of Advent and ends with the celebration of Christ the King Sunday in late November. A healthy year is a rhythmic and structured cycle of prayer, meditation, and daily practice. Christmas is merely the start of that journey, being set out into the world with a refreshed mission.
It says something that the first major Christian holidays after Christmas are celebrations of martyrdom because that’s part of the reality of life. In the Bible, the newborn Jesus is whisked away by Mary and Joseph to avoid persecution by the tyrannical King Herod, following his order to slay the newborn males in Bethlehem. But that’s not the end of the story. Christ lives!
But the days following Christmas on the calendar are St. Stephen’s Day (12/26), St. John (the Apostle) Day (12/27), the Feast of the Holy Innocents (12/28), and Feast of Thomas Beckett (12/29), in celebration of the children killed by King Herod. Many of Christianity’s most important martyrs are celebrated mere days after Christ’s birth.
This is the significance of Christmas’ placement in December. The light of the world, born humbly in a barn, on a dark forsaken night in a forlorn part of the Roman Empire, is the actual light of the world—the Word of God, creator of the world, and now born in the flesh as a baby. And that baby’s light would grow outward and save the world. He is surrounded by darkness, but that light cannot be hidden from the world.
Christmas Movies Are Incarnational Too
I started this article series by noting that one of the weirdest things about Christmas movies is the fact that you can’t watch them at the wrong time of year. It’s not something true of other holidays. I don’t need to watch Planes, Trains & Automobiles exclusively at Thanksgiving. Groundhog Day works on every day of the year, including Groundhog Day. Horror movies work outside of the month of October. But Christmas movies draw too much agony in March to be enjoyed. Having spent months thinking about Christmas movies, I now see why that is.
It is not that these movies cease to be good, but that they almost cease to exist. They have no place in the rest of the year. Christmas movies contain that incarnate quality of Christmas itself, and that quality is only tolerable for one or two months of the year before Christmas. When it cuts into something else, it feels like a violation of unstated social etiquette. It’s breaking the liturgical calendar! It’s not following the rules!
As melodramatic as it sounds, Christmas movies have the essence of this quality. Secular Christmas movies are too deeply tied into the holiday’s sentiment to be divorced from that reality. Like an Orthodox Icon, they are windows to something holy. As I’ve argued previously, the most irreverent and religiously ambivalent Christmas movie still has to draw on the intangible spirit of Christmas. They are liturgical and engaged in a manner no other films are engaged with preciously because we use them as part of our traditions. It is for this reason that Christmas movies have no place throughout the remainder of the year.
Carrying Christmas Into the New Year
This still leaves awkward questions about what to do next. As film critic Abbey Olcese notes:
“Our typical practice of Christmas is brief … The Bible, however, calls us to more than that. If we are, like Rachel, truly practitioners of God’s love, the love we give a baby on December 25 should carry through to following the teachings that baby shared when he grew up.”
Looking forward into the liturgical calendar, we see the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord on January 1 and the Feast of Epiphany on January 6, to celebrate Christ’s baptism and visitation by the Magi. Beyond that, there’s the season of Lent, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. The year then concludes on Christ the King Sunday in November, tying off the year with a reminder of Christ’s glory and kingship.
Maybe the reason it’s easy to feel empty on December 26 is that we don’t carry this lesson into the rest of the year. Christmas is supposed to teach us something. It must be the first length of a continuous thought. Without that continuity and structure, it leaves one wistful and yearning for more. But through this liturgical pattern, we see the narrative of birth, death, resurrection, and the great commission celebrated moment by moment.
The true spirit of Christmas is recognizing that it is a good thing that Christmas ends, while still internalizing its importance. If we cannot complete that thought, we aren’t allowing the holiday to transform us. And so, the season must end—whether on December 26 or January 6—so that we might walk the narrow path more truly.
To quote the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for the First Sunday of Christmas:
“Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, kindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
And so, I finally reached that moment of finality in the days after Christmas. My aging Christmas DVDs have been returned to their tote in the garage alongside the Christmas tree and the ornaments. The decorations are torn down and the lights are in their boxes. My scratched-up DVDs of A Christmas Story, and The Polar Express now sit in the dark tabernacle of my garage, enduring the bleak midwinter they helped stave off, waiting for their next liturgy—its next opportunity to be my yearly tradition again.
Really appreciate this article. Christmas is far and away my favorite time of year and the older I get the more bittersweet it becomes when it’s over. Sustaining that feeling of magic and deep spiritual resonance is something that pushed me towards a more liturgical faith. I love that it doesn’t end on the 25th, even if it does for so many. As you touched upon here, it is of equal importance how it sets up the coming church calendar so that we can give all the high holy days the reverence and seasons that they also deserve. It truly edifies ones faith.