This is the third entry in a multi-part article series running from November 1 to Epiphany. It discusses the themes and meaning of Christmas movies, digs into specific tropes, and unpacks the true nature of Christmas. The first essay can be found here and the second essay can be found here.
One of my favorite experiences as an adult satiating his wanderlust was my opportunity to visit the famous Christmas Story House in Ohio. During the later months of the COVID pandemic, when most vacation destinations were relatively quiet and vacant, two of my closest friends packed like sardines into my aging Chevy Silverado and drove three hours from Dayton to Cleveland to visit the house that director Bob Clarke scouted in 1982 to use for his upcoming movie A Christmas Story.
The current property and Airbnb occupy the better part of a city block, owning multiple properties in suburban Cleveland and having converted several of them into a residential museum near the historic building, which was primarily used for exterior shots. The interior of the two-story Victorian home looks nothing like the movie set, which was shot on a soundstage in Toronto. Even so, the current property is a labor of love. It was an entirely private residence until the original tenant sold the house in 2004 on eBay to a San Diego entrepreneur who saw the potential of a museum for a movie rapidly becoming one of the most popular Christmas movies since TNT had begun its annual 24-hour marathons in 1997.
A fastidious fan of the movie approaching the house for the first time will definitely start picking up on some of the cinematic trickery of the film right away. For starters, the movie hides the massive quarry drop-off behind the rear fence that a casual leap over would result in one’s imminent death. Local businesses like the Rowley Inn, an excellent pub with great Poutine, are mostly excised from the film. The neighboring houses have also changed over time, with the restored yellow and green home looking strangely plastic and bright amid the aging midwestern neighborhood.
The experience of visiting the museum was a deeply heartening one for this lifelong fan of the movie. Being born in 1995, I’ve never consciously known a time when A Christmas Story wasn’t popular. It was, at best, a sleeper hit in 1983, and dampened the career of a director who had already seen success with Porky’s and Black Christmas. It had emerged as a loving adaptation of Jean Shepard’s comedic short story collection In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, a loving pseudo-memoir of life in Great Depression-era Northern Indiana. Sadly, the movie version wouldn’t find its voice until it became a television staple.
A Christmas Story was MY childhood Christmas movie. It was my family tradition, alongside the equally nostalgic A Charlie Brown Christmas. I can distinctly remember wearing two DVDs of the movie as a child. My distinct memories of bundling up under blankets and watching it every Christmas made it something deeply personal to me. There are many similarities between my childhood and Ralphies, having grown up in the early 2000s near Chicago, with heavy snows, mechanical wonder, and grumpy depression-era family members being a distinct part of my childhood. My Christmas Days were always spent on an aging family farm not too dissimilar from Ralphie’s home. Whatever it was, the movie is now beyond criticism to me. Watching it is like drinking ambrosia. It’s life-affirming and makes me feel like a little kid again.
Other People’s Christmas Traditions
I say this to say that all Christmas movies affect Christmas-practicing people in this manner. Most people I’ve met have a Christmas movie that is like this for them. Most people remember sitting on their parent’s lap while their favorite movie plays, the Christmas tree’s lights bristle, and mom is cooking the Christmas ham or turkey. It is part of the essence of what makes the holiday so emotional.
But let’s consider this reality from the outside looking in. Have you ever experienced someone else’s Christmas traditions and found it utterly alienating? I recall this feeling when I was dating my first girlfriend. She insisted one December evening that we needed to watch Jingle All The Way, the 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas comedy. I’d never seen it before dating her, and my assumption going into it was that the movie looked silly and stupid.
My initial response to it was just to shrug. It seemed fine. I didn’t get it. I didn’t quite understand why my girlfriend wanted to crawl up on the couch and spend our date night watching this. I had no strong emotional response to that initial viewing other than bemusement for some of its performances and the cartoonish lengths its lead character goes to obtain a popular Christmas toy to repair his relationship with his son. And yet, she swooned over it and told me a story similar to my own experience with A Christmas Story, that she and her father had most of the movie memorized. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas and it was the films that made the season feel most right for her family.
As I said previously, the way people engage with Christmas movies is unlike any other genre in film. It doesn’t matter if your favorite Christmas movie is Elf, Home Alone, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Santa Clause, It’s A Wonderful Life, or Christmas Vacation. People become loyally devoted to the movies they most associate with their childhood. They watch them every December, often on an old worn-out DVD they’ve had since they were little, and often put it on at the same time every holiday as well—maybe on Christmas Eve or after everyone is winding down on Christmas day.
Are Christmas Movies Actually Bad?
This reality belays the underlying issue that, absent any nostalgia, the majority of Christmas movies are mediocre. Most of them are astroturfed, overly commercialized, cartoonish, and would not work if the heightened emotions of Christmas time weren’t covering up for their clear flaws. Their plots are formulaic and shallow, their writing is melodramatic and contrived, and they often smooth over major story issues with sentimentalism and schmaltz.
Even my beloved A Christmas Story isn’t beyond reproach. As film writer Dan Olson argues, the film’s loosely structured episodic vignettes are mostly a vehicle for materialistic nostalgia and consumerism that doesn’t even necessarily offer an edifying holiday message beyond its abrupt and awkward ending.
Most Christmas movies are poorly received by critics when they hit theaters, briefly fade into obscurity, and then find themselves a decade later being frequently revived on television or special theatrical screenings. The bad ones fade into the background, but even mediocre works frequently worm into TNT reruns and revival screenings. Infamously, It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story were both commercial failures that only became popularized through repeated reruns on television.
I don’t mean this as a blanket condemnation of the genre. Plenty of Christmas movies are also great cinema, including Miracle on 34th Street, Shop Around The Corner, Remember the Night, Nightmare Before Christmas, Love Actually, Klaus, and The Holdovers, but many are not. Most are mediocre or severely flawed in ways general audiences wouldn’t tolerate in non-Christmas fiction. Absent the loyalty of television audiences, most Rankin-Bass films are tedious and awkward. White Christmas isn’t nearly as good a movie as its most famous musical number. Elf is incredibly annoying to people who don’t already love Elf. The Polar Express is uncannily terrifying to the majority of the general public. Christmas With The Kranks is a dystopian nightmare.
One only needs to look at IMDB’s Top 100 Christmas Movies of all-time list to see the discrepancy between people’s emotional attachment and the quality of the films. The majority of each film’s Metacritic scores are in the 6/10s and 7/10s. The list is topped by films like Violent Night, and The Christmas Chronicles. Neither are terrible films, but both exemplify the way people become attached to films that aren’t firing on all cylinders.
That said, objective quality is rarely a question with Christmas cinema because the mode of engagement with this genre is rooted in things outside of quality. If you grew up wearing out a DVD copy of Deck The Halls, Fred Claus, or The Santa Clause 3, it’s going to be a classic for you. Trying to merit the objective quality of a Christmas movie and compare it to Citizen Kane is a fruitless task. The mode of engagement with this subgenre is completely different than other genres.
Christmas Rituals and Traditions
When I first watched Jingle All The Way and tried to decipher why my girlfriend was suddenly so wistful and happy, I was making the mistake of viewing the film primarily as a film. But she wasn’t just watching Jingle All The Way as a film. She was watching it as a ritual and inviting me to partake in it. Watching this silly movie with her was her way at the time of inviting me into her family’s traditions.
Christmas movies only really make sense in a liturgical sense. They are an act that takes on divine meaning through repetition and loyalty. They reflect the things we do to ground ourselves in a solid foundation through yearly acts of contrition. We cuddle up with hot chocolate and quote our favorite scenes because it’s just the thing our family does ritualistically. We set up the same Christmas tree. We bake the same Christmas cookies. We mail Christmas cards to the same 50 people. We fly halfway across the country to meet with the same annoying people who annoyed us last year. Christmas is structured and regimented by expectations, days of obligation, and forced ritual merriment, but that regularity is part of what makes it familiar.
As film essayist Patrick H. Willems beautifully argues, Christmas exists as a means for people who perform these rituals:
“Some are universal, like putting up a Christmas tree, but every family has their own specific ones. It’s why I really like The Night Before, which is entirely about why the important part of Christmas is the silly rituals and how much they mean to us … For me, the holiday is defined by these rituals. The holiday itself doesn’t have meaning, we have to give it meaning.”
As with real-world traditions, they can be quite alienating to the uncatechized. Like the unbeliever who walks into a Catholic mass for the first time, he may be scandalized by the idea that the God who created the universe now has been consecrated as a cracker. One almost needs to join RCIA classes to get properly included in your girlfriend’s favorite family Christmas movie and why her dad laughs hysterically at the same scenes every year. But after a few years, anyone would begin to pick up on the internal jokes and quote the same lines. Its nuances blossom with each viewing.
The act of watching a Christmas movie builds like a muscle. Maybe that is why people get mad at you for enjoying Christmas out of season. It’s like exercising the wrong muscle and getting a cramp.
Each year, I dig into my storage closet and pull out plastic totes filled with decorations. I dig into the boxes of DVDs in the garage to find my Christmas movies and pull out whatever I can find. I spent the month of December enraptured in anticipatory Advent joy, baking my grandmother’s cookie recipes, and setting up my dad’s aging Lionel trains under the Christmas tree. I pour over Christmas DVDs and rewatch goofy Christmas specials on YouTube like TeamFourStar’s Plan To Eradicate Christmas or Rifftrax Live’s Christmas Shorts-stravaganza!
Each year, I find my old worn-out copies of The Polar Express and The Santa Clause 3, which as an adult I admit fully haven’t aged as wonderfully as I remember. But I’ll still put them on and smile. Each year, I see the scratched copy of A Christmas Story on my dad’s living room bookshelf that skips over scenes and I remember watching that exact copy as a child. Each year, I’ll play my CDs of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Charlie Brown Christmas everywhere I drive and feel warm inside.
As film critic Sonny Bunch writes:
“The entire conceit of TNT’s 24 Hours of A Christmas Story is just another manifestation of crass commercialism. But is one that’s wholly welcome, as far as I’m concerned. Because the annual tradition has created a family ritual and touchstone that now spans generations. What makes A Christmas Story the quintessential Christmas movie isn’t just the movie itself. It’s the way the movie has been force-fed to us—which has turned it into a tradition. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching It’s A Wonderful Life or Scrooged or A Christmas Story. What matters is that you’re watching it with your family, year after year. As you grow up together. As you grow old together.”
If I ever get married and have the opportunity to share Christmas movies with my children, I can only imagine they’ll develop similar attachments to me. They’ll marvel at A Christmas Story, its wondrous childlike eye, and its attraction to mechanical wonderment. They’ll sit on the living room floor of our midwestern home and think about how Ralpie’s parents remind them of their grandparents. And like myself, little Rupert and Beatrice will grow to remember A Christmas Story as a way their father connected with them. It will become their ritual, and they’ll become the next chain in the link of my silly Christmas tradition.