This is the fourth 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, second, and third essays can be found here.
When examining the history of Christmas movies, one begins to recognize how Christmas operates as a subgenre. It ebbs and flows with the film industry trends, following popular genres. It rarely drives other genres but chases them, adding the aesthetics and settings of the holiday season to the stars and tastes of the moment.
The 1940s saw many screwball comedies (Shop Around The Corner), musicals (White Christmas), and prestige dramas (It’s A Wonderful Life). The 1960s saw a flood of low-budget family-friendly television specials (Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer) and B-movies (Santa Claus Conquers The Martians). The 1980s saw many big-budget comedies (Christmas Vacation) and genre films (Die Hard). The 1990s saw several sentimental dramas (The Family Man) and kid’s movies (The Santa Clause). The 2000s and 2010s saw multiple raunchy sex comedies (Bad Santa), stoner comedies (Very Harold & Kumar Christmas), big-budget animated fantasy films (The Polar Express), legacy sequels (A Christmas Story Christmas), and remakes (The Grinch). There are obvious standouts and exceptions, but the trends speak to the state of the industry in each period.
I’ve said several times in this article series that Christmas movies are a subgenre, and that is worth unpacking. Genre fiction can be a fickle thing. It usually refers to a series of tropes or aesthetics that are common to a style of storytelling. If you rent a Western or a romance movie, you can usually guess the tone and structure of the story as an assumption. One could certainly make the case that Christmas movies are their own genre, but that would reignite the definition debate from the first article in this series.
What is interesting about movies set at Christmas is that they still contain the qualities of a “Christmas movie” writ large. The movies are defined by the holidays and culture around them. But the potent nature of the holiday also means that Christmas also works backward into movies and affects the characters. It may not do so in a manner as potently as Miracle on 34th Street or The Muppet Christmas Carol, but it does have an effect on stories and characters. Christmas can alter the dynamics or feelings of a movie that wouldn’t otherwise contain it. You may go into a superhero movie like Batman Returns expecting the tropes of a superhero movie, but you also get the added benefit of Christmas themes and aesthetic flourishes to lighten an otherwise dark vigilante story.
This was one of filmmaker Shane Black’s greatest insights, given that he is famous for setting the majority of his crime thrillers and action romps during Christmas time. Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Iron Man 3 all use Christmas as part of their mise en scène, to the point where it regularly affects character motivations and decisions within the plot.
As he said in a 2013 interview with Den Of Geek, “Christmas is fun. It’s unifying, and all your characters are involved in this event that stays within the larger story. It roots it, I think, it grounds everything. At Christmas, lonely people are lonelier, seeing friends and families go by. People take reckoning, they (sic) stock of where their lives are at Christmas. It just provides a backdrop against which different things can play out but with one unifying, global heading. I’ve always liked it, especially in thrillers, for some reason. It’s a touch of magic.”
When this instinct bumps up into the tropes of other genres, you get unique flavors and pairings. Every genre has its expectations and tropes, but Christmas becomes one more layer to the complexity of the artwork. Die Hard may or may not be definitionally considered a Christmas movie, but the flavors added by setting the movie at Christmas add part of its charm, motivate the characters, and give the factions of the film a common language to speak in, such as when McClane leaves one of the terrorist’s bodies with a message on it saying “Now I have a machine gun, Ho Ho Ho!”
With that in mind, let’s take a look at several prominent genre films—action movies, rom-coms, horror films, etc.—and consider the effect Christmas has on how these films function!
A Christmas Heist Film: Reindeer Games
I want to start with a negative example first to highlight the ways this dynamic doesn’t work and use that as a basis going forward. John Frankenheimer’s Reindeer Games holds the position as one of the worst films I had the pleasure of watching in preparation for this project, and also holds the distinct reputation as one of Ben Affleck’s first early career flops, breaking much of the goodwill he’d gained from Good Will Hunting.
It is obvious every frame and line of dialogue is actively imbued with Christmas references as part of its DNA. Our lead character Rudy begins the film in prison talking about how much he wants hot chocolate while discussing with his close friend Nick that he’d like to have an affair with his girlfriend once he gets out of jail. He then proceeds to get out of jail and has graphic sex with her, pretending he’s secretly Nick, while the soundtrack plays Let It Snow, and he contemplates leaving her after New Year’s.
The entire film has a vibe of uncomfortable sleaze coated in a layer of cozy Christmas aesthetics. Not long after the sex scene, the two get kidnapped by a trashy gang leader who demands that Nick help his crew rob a local Indian Casino. A convoluted series of reveals, betrayals and story decisions follow in which the crew rob the casino while dressed as Santa. Rudy manages to survive the heist and reflects in the epilogue that he’s gained a new appreciation for the holidays.
As film reviewer Doug Walker argues, this premise has the potential on paper to be a great subversive dark comedy, but it’s not. It’s a bleak action movie where tons of characters die. The protagonist is gross and the villains are scummy murderers. There isn’t much redeemable about anyone in the cast and very little is learned in the process. Going forward, the examples that follow will actively use Christmas in a useful way, but Reindeer Games is the gold standard for how hollow gesturing toward the holiday does not make for a meaningful Christmas movie.
That said, the Christmas aesthetics do at least make the movie somewhat watchable. The dissonance between the sleazy characters and the story are somewhat alleviated by the Christmas flavors. But given that heist films are all about strong setup and payoff—highly structured and meticulous plans that create tension by going wrong—it just serves to cover up the movie’s sloppiness. These characters fail because they’re backstabbing, incompetent, and selfish.A better movie would either make them redeemable or make it clear they deserve their terrible fates, and a Christmas version of that would either thrive on the dissonance or bring out something deeper from characters doing such evil actions during the holidays.
A Christmas Action Film: John Woo’s Silent Night
While the first example was both a bad film and a bad Christmas movie, this next example is conversely a bad film and a good Christmas movie. They might sound counterintuitive, but John Woo’s epic return to action filmmaking in 2023 creatively engages with the holiday. Set against the backdrop of the Christmas season, Silent Night is a revenge actioner with the gimmick that the entire film lacks dialogue. It’s intended to be pure action and visual storytelling from beginning to end, even in a handful of scenes where the stars have to pantomime complex relationship troubles.
Much like any other revenge thriller protagonist, our lead Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) is an average Texan father whose life is destroyed when a random act of gang violence results in his son’s death. He was also injured in the attack, but his vocal cords were damaged and he was rendered mute, leaving him unable to talk to his grieving wife. Unable to cope with the trauma, he sets out on a path of training and vengeance to kill the gangsters who destroyed his family.
The film used Christmas as a metaphor for communication. The lead character’s muteness and toxic unwillingness to connect to his family as he seeks vengeance is highlighted by how the Christmas season is traditionally intended to bring people together. The film’s title is even an ironic subversion of this. Particularly of note is the way the film uses Christmas imagery as a contrast for its violent climax. The murdered child’s love of toy trains highlights his innocence, an innocence that reflects the season itself. The impending violence is trying to highlight the ironic dissonance in our lead character’s state of mind as he trains and embraces vigilantism.
Sadly, the film mostly falls apart in execution. It’s a dull experience with surprisingly middling action from the legendary director of films like Hardboiled and Face/Off. Regardless, the thematic implications are still a good illustration of how Christmas works in the action genre.It can highlight aspects of the character and story to make them more meaningful.
A Christmas Buddy Cop Movie: Lethal Weapon
Being Shane Black’s first and most famous script, it shouldn’t be surprising that Lethal Weapon draws heavily on the spirit of Christmas for its story of illegal drug trading and defunct CIA projects. It is a film explicitly set during the holidays but uses Christmas intelligently as a motivating factor for its incredibly unstable protagonist. From the film’s outset, LAPD Sgt. Martin Riggs is a deeply troubled and suicidal man. Following the death of his wife, he’s shown to be despondent and reckless, putting a gun in his mouth at one point after a Christmas-themed Looney Toons cartoon reminds him of how his wife isn’t with him for the holidays. Thankfully, his partner Murtaugh works with him despite his mental state and builds a bond with him as they fight crime.
The buddy cop genre is one rooted in dissonance. Two characters with opposing personalities—a straight man and a funny guy—are planted in a situation where they have to learn to work together. They can come from different cultures or walks of life, but their situation calls for them to work out their issues and save the day. Lethal Weapon ends with Riggs being invited to his partner’s Christmas dinner, where he gifts him the bullet he tried to use to kill himself. Their bonding hasn’t just saved the day but saved his soul, symbolically bringing Riggs into a new family to celebrate the year’s biggest holiday.
A Christmas Slasher Film: Black Christmas
It’s a curious and funny thing that the progenitor of the slasher genre is also technically a Christmas film, with a name nonetheless riffing on Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Director Bob Clark, cinematographer Reginald H. Morris, and editor Stan Cole are more famous for their later collaboration on A Christmas Story, but the same eye that produced such a romantic and nostalgic vision of a 1940s Christmas is here inverted with a voyeuristic and unsettling edge.
On Christmas Eve, five women living in an off-campus sorority house find themselves inundated with disgustingly sexual phone calls. The sexually liberated young women, one of whom has just discovered her boyfriend got her pregnant, begin disappearing one at a time as a faceless stranger stalks them inside the walls of their home. While the rest of the city goes on with caroling and celebrating, the surviving women unknowingly face the possibility of a brutal death.In one of the film’s most striking visuals toward the end of the film, one of the last survivors, unknowing of the threat, answers her front door to carolers singing O Come All Ye Faithful as her friend upstairs is brutally stabbed to death, her screams hushed by the soothing harmonies of the carolers.
Black Christmas’ paranoia and horror are rooted in the cognitive dissonance between the coziness of the season and the horrifying actions of the serial killer, almost suggesting that the holiday’s softness tends to cover up the underlying grotesqueness of the season and the darker parts of humanity. It is, after all, a film about characters being killed by comfortable ignorance while the audience watches its killer act with impunity.John Carpenter would later master this formula with the more tonally consistent and masterfully suspenseful Halloween, but the roots of that genre were born in the unsettling dissonance of Christmas.
A Christmas War Film: Joyeux Noel
Cognitive dissonance is not the only effect Christmas can have on a story. Often, the gauge of HOW Christmasy a film comes down to impacts how much it affects the characters. And in that regard, there are few genre films I can think of where Christmas has a more potent effect on the plot than the 2005 Oscar-nominated World War I film Joyeux Noel.
The film is based on the real-life event of the 1914 Christmas Truce. On Christmas Eve night, across the frontlines in Belgium and France, battles between German and English forces came to an abrupt halt when soldiers began recognizing Christmas hymns being sung in the other side’s language. As soldiers on both sides began harmonizing and singing Stille Nacht/Silent Night together across languages and borders, hundreds of them began to emerge onto no man’s land to call for a holiday truce to bury the dead and celebrate the holiday, even sharing personal contact info, rations, alcohol and prayers with men they had thus far only known as enemies.
The real-life event was a testament to the triumph of the human spirit and the power of religion to cross the boundaries of enemies and bigotries. If there were ever a real-life moment when the spirit of Christmas came upon the world, it was this one. The movie is less so. As film critic Roger Ebert points out, its sentimentality is too muted by its depressing ending and its warfare isn’t brutal enough to convey the starkness of why this moment was shocking. It proves to be quite melodramatic and middling outside of its key scenes.
But those key scenes are among the greatest in any contemporary war film. When the German Opera singer leaps over the edge of no man’s land, the Germans and English soldiers alike are shocked. The English have to hold themselves back from sniping him, as it could be a trap. But the palpable tension takes hold as the opera singer approaches the English with an open heart and blind trust. The Scottish soldiers begin performing bagpipes to his performance. The tension of two factions struggling with whether to entertain this moment is gripping, but the spirit of Christmas prevails and both sides emerge to celebrate a Catholic mass together. Even if it’s just a few minutes, these scenes perfectly capture the beauty of this painfully human moment.
A Christmas Dark Comedy: Bad Santa
If Christmas can soften the hearts of battle-hardened World War I veterans, it can soften anybody’s heart. That doesn’t mean that such a transformation is easy. If Terry Zwigoff’s 2003 black comedy Bad Santa is any indication, it can be a long road to allowing one’s self to open their heart enough to enjoy the holiday.Starring Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox as a clever pair of criminals who steal from department store vaults during the holidays, our protagonist Willie Soke is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking Mall Santa. He starts the film as a bitter drunk, remembering his abusive childhood living with his dad where Christmas didn’t mean anything, and now spends his holidays picking up women at bars, swearing at children, and barely tolerating his day job.
But one year, he finds himself persistently tailed by a young boy who is convinced that this barely disguised middle-aged man is Santa Claus, refusing to leave his side and leave him alone. Through a series of shenanigans and uncomfortable scenes, Willie slowly ends up bonding with the boy and being transformed by the young child’s faith in him. In a roundabout way, it’s a wonderful expression of the way that connection and empathy can open hearts and help us learn to appreciate our own lives more. As film critic Sonny Bunch puts it, “It’s deeply funny and, in its own perverse way, deeply sweet. Even though it’s played for shock value, the truth is the movie wouldn’t work without Christmas in it.”It shows that transformation is possible for the least of us through the power of the season, a notable feat given the way the dark humor is front-loaded.
A Christmas Sex Comedy: Four Christmases
In an Aristotelian sense, comedies are about the restoration of order among ordinary people as they are faced with the realities of vice and human folly. This seems very true for one of the most popular genres of the 2000s, the Gen X sex comedy. Filmmakers like Judd Apatow found a unique voice by contrasting the irreverence and anxieties of his generation with the social expectations of family, marriage, and conformity.Four Christmases is an effective if trashy expression of these anxieties.
From the film’s outset, our protagonists played by Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are completely detached and self-absorbed. They are a sexually licentious San Francisco couple who scoff at tradition and family, due in part to the fact that they’re both children of divorce and regularly lie to their families so that they can fly to holiday destinations over Christmas.When a weather emergency grounds their plane indefinitely, they find themselves trapped in a scenario where they must now pay their dues to their parents and visit four separate Christmas parties over a day, where they struggle with trashy relatives, overbearing Christian relatives, relationship problems, and the sudden revelation that they are now unexpectedly due to be having a child together.
To our protagonists, Christmas is something like a suit that doesn’t fit right. Tradition feels hollow to people who don’t understand it, and being forced to conform to societal expectations becomes a farce because they don’t know how to handle it. Being asked to play Mary and Jesus at the last minute for a megachurch nativity play only highlights how uncomfortable they are pretending to be something they aren’t. But the movie is also about why those expectations are inevitable. The reality of pregnancy and long-term relationships forces them to grow up and grow into those traditions that become meaningful later.
A Christmas Monster Movie: Krampus
Speaking of non-conformity, Krampus is one of the few recent Christmas movies to explore the grotesque underside of the season in a way that speaks to the challenges of the holiday in more than merely shocking ways. There have been plenty of Christmas horror flicks, from Silent Night, Deadly Night to Santa Claws, Silent Night (2021), and three different versions/remakes of Black Christmas. Krampus is notable primarily because of its ambition; desiring to create a wholly original monster movie that explores the infamous German fairy tale of Krampus, a demonic helper to St. Nicolas who haunts naughty children.
Trick ‘r Treat and Godzilla: King Of The Monsters director Michael Dougherty here produces some of the most satirically biting and cynical filmmaking of his career, with a film that explores the way that bitterness, consumerism, and loss of hope metastasize into a disaster, as the demonic Christmas monster haunts a German-American family dealing with run-of-the-mill problems like annoying family members and losing faith in Santa Claus. But given that Christmas is a holiday that has a fair amount of understandable negativity, especially for people who don’t have healthy families or happy memories, these are defensible emotions, especially if you find consumerism and your annoying family members intolerable.
Krampus can be a highly over-the-top film experience, to the point where the monster’s actions feel cruel and largely undeserved. By the end, the human toll of what’s happened is so intense that the ending feels hollow as if to acknowledge that merely surrendering to the holiday and accepting the artificiality of the season is the wrong lesson these characters should have learned. Christmas becomes a near-literal hell when these characters don’t solve their problems, which leaves it a bitter-sweet watching experience. It’s like a darker version of Christmas Vacation where nobody learns any lessons, but maybe that is appropriate for a German bedtime story…
A Christmas Gothic Fairy Tale: The Nightmare Before Christmas
If any Christmas film has developed a stronger cult following in the past 30 years, I can’t think of one stronger than Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s a highly unusual film, in that it’s both a Halloween flick and a Christmas movie, but it’s all the better for it. Its quirky humor, remarkable soundtrack, and fascinating character study of its lead character Jack Skellington make it among the best films of its type ever made.
At its heart though, The Nightmare Before Christmas is also a strangely reactionary story. It always struck me as curious that a movie so deeply adored by young progressives and non-conformists would also be a story about the failures of trying new things and leaping into the unknown. But as G.K. Chesterton famously notes about fairy tales, “You will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread.” The thread holding Halloween Town and Christmas Town together is their distinctiveness. When Jack attempts to become Santa Claus, he fails because he doesn’t understand Christmas.
To quote the Catholic cartoonist Owen Cyclops, Jack “correctly intuits that the stuff is superfluous. He’s on the surface level. He knows he is clearly missing the thing Christmas is really about. He cannot see or grasp the thing at the core that makes Christmas what it is secular. My posit is that the reason this movie has an instinctual resonance in our culture is because Jack’s experience is the experience of the modern person, here explicated as their experience of the holidays. Jack is from Halloween world. That’s who he is. So, when he participates in Christmas, he makes it like Halloween. That’s the modern secular person. You can see the stuff in this other realm, and the stuff in it is so cool and magical. You really love it. But the core of it, the thing that makes it what it is, is antithetical to you. So, when you try to participate in it, you make it more secular. You make it more like your world—when what drew you to it in the first place is that it’s the opposite of your world.”
Christmas is transformative, but its core is often elusive. Seeing that it is a thing that changes people and digging beyond the superficialities enough to allow that transformation are two different things. To those living non-conforming lives, a fairy tale about that tension captures the tragic heart of alienation. You become free of expectations, but cannot benefit from them. But you can remain happy in your realm.Christmas helps Jack become the avatar for self-actualization and fulfillment in a world of distinctiveness, where the outside finds new joy in remaining the outsider.
A Christmas Romance: Remember The Night
To allow Christmas to fully transform us, there must be empathy. It is certainly a remarkable thing that it can change us, but there must be participation in that interaction for the heart to change. This is more or less the plot of every Christmas love story, of which there are hundreds. From classics like The Shop Around The Corner and Love Actually to the hundreds of Hallmark romcoms, love stories require change and transformation, and Christmas has provided the outlet for no shortage of such stories.
Remember The Night is one of the best love stories set at Christmas on film, thanks in part to the biting edge of filmmaker Preston Sturge’s best screenplays. Starring Old Hollywood greats Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, the film follows cynical New York City prosecutor John Sargent as he’s faced with a challenging case. Lee Leander is caught stealing an expensive bracelet from a jewelry store and is relying upon the holiday goodwill of the jury to avoid prison. Sargent cynically convinces the court to postpone the hearing until after the holidays when he can secure a guilty sentence, but ends up taking pity on the crafty criminal being forced to spend Christmas alone in prison, and invites her to join his family celebration in Indiana.
After a long car drive and a beautiful holiday, John and Lee strongly bond over their similarities. Her warm reception by Sargent’s family, in comparison to her disowning mother, immediately sees her inculcated into their Christmas and New Year’s traditions, where she begins to learn about John’s tragic childhood that turned him into such a hardened adult. The experience of sharing the holidays leads the two of them deeply in love, but also struggle to reconcile that with the reality that he’s still expected to prosecute her after the holidays. It all leads to its exciting final courtroom scenes where they must either decide for John to destroy his career or Lee to accept the consequences of her poor decisions.
Relationships are hard. Love often arises at inopportune moments. But the spirit of Christmas is the spirit of mercy and kindness. John and Lee start the movie closed off due to their pasts, but the few weeks they spend together completely change them into people willing to throw caution to the wind and sacrifice their lives for love. But at a different time of year, this story wouldn’t happen. Sargent makes it clear early on that his career is focused on selling hard cases to juries, especially those with female criminals. At any other time of year, John would never have felt the pity needed to drive a wedge into his heart.
A Christmas Musical: Holiday Inn
It’s often been said that musical numbers in films function the same as action scenes. There is a flow and narrative to them that starts with characters in one place and ends with them in another. That is certainly the case in the 1942 classic Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire musical Holiday Inn, where a chaotic series of love triangles plays out throughout three Christmases and a dozen holidays in between. Famous for being the film that popularized the Irving Berlin song White Christmas, it remains one of the most popular Christmas-themed musicals of all time, which is impressive given how wide a field that is.
Naturally, the film isn’t strictly a Christmas movie. It also celebrates New Year’s Eve, Lincoln’s birthday, Washington’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving. However, its most important moments of character development largely come on Christmas. When Jim (Crosby) announces he’s first retiring from performing and his fiancee leaves him for his partner Tim (Astaire), it’s during a Christmas performance. When Jim returns to performing after a year of failing as a farmer, it is the following Christmas when he announces his plans to convert his farm into a destination hotel for major holiday weekends, where he and his new romantic partner Linda perform. When Jim wins back his love at the climax, he’s singing White Christmas on Christmas Eve in a callback to when they first fell in love.
Christmas proves to be the most potent force in Holiday Inn, when emotions run the highest and when grand acts of love feel the most right. Each of the musical numbers ends up serving other purposes in the narrative, such as the poorly aged musical number for Lincoln’s birthday where Jim and Linda wear blackface to avoid allowing Tim to find and steal her heart away too. But they all leave the characters in a different place than when they started. Certainly, the musical numbers in the film are more diegetic than most musicals, but the fact that Crosby wins back the love of his life with his most famous Christmas song certainly affirms the spirit of the holiday.
A Christmas Spy Movie:RedOne
Despite the film’s general confusion and messiness, Dwayne Johnson’s notable Christmas actioner has all of the traits of a classic espionage film. It’s tactile, filled with large government organizations like E.L.F. and M.O.R.A., uses techno-gadgets that turn toys into their real-life equivalents and explores exotic locations. The visual of The Rock and Chris Evans driving a sports car along the Aruba evokes the feeling of every James Bond film that has done the same thing.
Spy movies are about the preservation of order, complex webs of secretive organizations working together to stop agents of chaos and violent change from destroying the world, often by stopping nukes or superweapons from being stolen or going off. Their villains are often philosophical, such as Henry Cavill’s character in Mission: Impossible – Fallout wanting to reshape the world into a more peaceful and unified place through a grand act of genocidal violence. That’s certainly the case with the Christmas Witch Grýla, who believes Santa’s power is wasted when it could be used to punish and contain mankind’s growing naughtiness.
In a genre known for moral grays and relativism, Red One keeps its moral compass firmly rooted. In place of order,itpresupposes that Santa Claus and world governments work together to keep supernatural creatures at bay. And considering the world is growing more naughty and chaotic over time, Santa’s mission remains more important than ever. The cheerfulness of Christmas is a hope that drives the world to be better. The inclusion of the “naughty” hacker Jack Wolf also provides a buddy-cop element to the story, with the world’s most cynical mercenary finding the spirit of the season and choosing to become a better father and man. The power of Christmas proves to be a serious business but one that drives serious people to do better.
A Christmas Ghost Story: Beyond Tomorrow
Let’s close out the final four examples with weirdness! One of the most forgotten Christmas films of Old Hollywood is a chaotic and little-remembered fantasy B-movie that loosely riffs on A Christmas Carol. On one Christmas Eve, a party of three elderly businessmen (a survivor of the Russian Revolution, a Texan cowboy, and a New York school teacher) gather for an eclectic and unexpected holiday party where the latter two members fall in love after meeting for the first time. When the businessmen die shortly thereafter in a tragic plane crash, they return to Earth as ghosts who can be perceived only by their elderly Russian friend and try to intercede in a manner that would allow the young lovers to pair off and get married.
Christmas ghost stories are hardly a new thing. In reality, ghost stories have a lineage in Christmas literature that goes back well beyond A Christmas Carol due to the numinous and supernatural implications of the holiday. It is certainly a day that contains the emotions of being close to the supernatural, and ghost stories are valuable in the way they help the living contextualize and understand their lives in light of revelations from the beyond.
The plot follows the trials of young couple James and Jean, while also struggling to build a relationship together when he almost falls into a love triangle with an actress and her ex-husband. The film takes some abrupt turns, including a later argument between one of the ghosts and God over when souls are allowed to enter heaven. It carries the awkwardness of a B-movie at times but evens out into a sweet redemption story where the intercession of the three ghosts allows John and Jean’s remarkable Christmas romance to have an opportunity that can only come from God’s mercy.It’s A Christmas Carol but told from the perspectives of the ghosts.
A Christmas Fantasy Epic: Disney’s The Nutcracker And The Four Realms
On Christmas Eve, a young girl is drawn from the real world into a fantasy realm of sugar plums, toy soldiers, snowflakes, and whimsey where she meets a soldier who helps defend her from a mad monarch. This is the plot of the classic ballet The Nutcracker, but also a summary of one of Disney’s strangest recent projects. Drawing heavily on their attempts to turn Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland into darker fantasy epics, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms attempts to create a unique fantasy epic by way of a Christmas movie. Sadly, it didn’t work, and the movie bombed critically and financially.
The movie is overwhelmingly reliant on the fact that contemporary Christmas iconography draws heavily on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, with its imagery and music heavily influencing our cultural idea of Christmas. From its opening scenes of a Victorian English family opening Christmas presents and attending a Christmas Eve ball, it’s a film drenched in the aesthetics of Christmas. Its color scheme is red, green, gold, and white, and its whimsical (if horrifying) energy tries to awkwardly capture what the public recognizes about the original story. It wants to marry these images and sounds with an exciting journey of self-discovery, action, and powers clashing like The Lord of the Rings.
That certainly makes it unique as a Christmas film, even if the story is too distracted to have much of a holiday feeling or message. Plenty of Christmas films use fairy tale stories and fantasy tropes, but usually in homely settings. It evokes the incarnational joy that the supernatural can come into anyone’s home on Christmas. The potential of a high fantasy Christmas epic is enticing, but a movie like this shows its weaknesses. When the Fellowship of the Ring departs Rivendell on December 25th in Lord of the Rings, it’s an act of desperation and bravery, but it isn’t a Christmas story. It’s merely a thematic echo of what Christmas would be in the mythological context of the world of Middle Earth. Fusing those aesthetics and emotions with the values of Christmas is an uphill battle (although Tolkien’s Letters From Father Christmas, with goblin battles and wars at the North Pole, suggests it can be done).
The movie nudges at the idea of Christmas as a time for connection, and that presents are a way of connecting us and learning about them, but such values are lost in its gonzo plot of mad queens and science contraptions. Even the titular Nutcracker is sidelined in favor of a more strong-willed techie female protagonist who merely needs to learn to believe in herself. It proves far too unfocused and chaotic to achieve its premise.
A Christmas Western: John Ford’s 3 Godfathers
As the YouTuber Patrick H. Willems once asked, “Where are all the Christmas westerns?” This is a great question! There are certainly dozens of forgotten low-quality Westerns produced during that great period of classic Hollywood when more than half of its output were Westerns, and a handful of them must take place during Christmas. This is likely true of other genres like fantasy and science fiction. But as the previous example shows, there isn’t much of a precedent for high-genre fiction to delve too deeply into Christmas themes outside of a handful of Christmas-themed episodes of Doctor Who.Thankfully, there is at least one great Christmas Western and it happens to be one of the great collaborations between Western legends John Wayne and John Ford; the pairing that shaped the Western genre at its peak and created the mythology of America’s Old West origins.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Three wise men from the far-east come upon a town named Jerusalem, guided by a mysterious star in the sky, where they are led to encounter a newborn baby. This is the story of the Magi, described in the Gospel of Matthew as three mysterious travelers who come to give the newborn Christ gifts befitting a great king. But the men in 3 Godfathers are not wise. They are bank robbers. Chased out of town with their new riches into the desert without water, the three stumble upon the pregnant niece of the town sheriff while she’s giving birth. Before dying, she asks the men to become the godfathers of her baby boy and leaves them with a small Bible.
The allusions made between the three Magi and the three fugitives of 3 Godfathers only become more direct in the back half of the film, which is set in December and climaxes on Christmas Eve. They accept their mission to deliver the child to the city of New Jerusalem, Arizona, as it becomes something of a redemption pilgrimage, one made harder by dehydration and life-threatening injuries that claim several of their lives.
3 Godfathers proves to be quite remarkable in its exploration of atonement for one’s sins, which isn’t surprising for an Irish-Catholic filmmaker like Ford. Sin does not pay in the wasteland, but only results in death. But self-sacrifice and keeping to one’s oaths is redeeming, and even results in seeming acts of divine providence like the miraculous appearance of a donkey that can carry the analogous newborn king into New Jerusalem. It is this honor that carries John Wayne’s character into Christmas Day, where he receives mercy for his honesty and having won over the hearts of New Jerusalem with his sacrifice. He departs the story happy in the knowledge that a renewed life awaits him on the other side of his penance.The gunslinger has been redeemed!
A Christmas Sci-Fi Space Opera: The Star Wars Holiday Special
From the sublime to the ridiculous, George Lucas’ infamous 1978 televised Christmas special remains the gold standard for “lost” media and bizarre holiday programming. If The Nutcracker and the Four Realms showed just how hard it can be to adapt Christmas into high-genre settings, Star Wars proves that it’s even harder when half your cast and crew is allegedly coked up.The non-canon special, which would never see the light of day in an official release after 1978, is a barely comprehensible feature-length variety show ostensibly set in the Star Wars equivalent of Christmas, called “Life Day.” While the movie doesn’t explain much of its meaning and background, the franchise’s official website calls it a celebration of “the values and tenets of Wookiee culture, including family, joy, and harmony.”
While the ostensible plot is that Han Solo is struggling to get Chewbacca back to his home planet to celebrate the holiday with his clan, the actual content of the film entirely consists of a family of Wookiees growling at each other for 90 minutes while watching various variety show programs, including a Jefferson Starship music performance, a circus act, cartoons, and sketch comedy acts hosted by Beatrice Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman, with franchise mainstays Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia occasionally calling in to comment on the nominal Han Solo plot happening in the distant background.
The entire experience is best described as intermittently surreal and boring. It is no wonder that the special was disowned by everybody involved. The “holiday” aspect of the special is mostly saved for the finale, when all of the Wookiees don red robes, hold glowing orbs, and are transported to the Tree of Life for a festival with the main cast where Princess Leia gives a speech:“This holiday is yours, but we all share with you the hope that this day brings us closer to freedom, harmony, and peace. No matter how differently we appear, we’re all the same in our struggle against the powers of evil and darkness. I hope this day will always be a day of joy, in which we can affirm our dedication and our courage, and more than anything else our love for one another. This is the promise of the Tree of Life.”
Despite the Star Wars flavor, Life Day is vaguely syncretic with Christmas in the sense that it’s about finding joy, peace, and unity in the depths of darkness. The finale captures some of the energy of the nativity, cloistered in a dark cold place but surrounded by the warmth of love and family, but in a bizarre dress. Unfortunately, it falls into the Reindeer Games problem of gesturing toward the holiday without imbibing it. It would be too far to put a Christmas tree on the Millennium Falcon, but the “plot” of this unfortunate special is completely divorced from Leia’s call to action.
The need for an organic science fiction setting doesn’t preclude that the story itself reflects why Life Day is so important that Han Solo would risk his life to celebrate it. Given George Lucas’ appreciation for Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, he could’ve written a fascinating archetypal exploration of the holidays that captures their essence and their power to affect people, but that would mean making an actual movie rather than a fever dream.
