Christmas evokes powerful memories. That’s why for so many it is a difficult holiday. It is not really about the present; it’s that moment on the calendar when we inevitably become reflective. We are all of us haunted by the ghosts of Christmas Past. And the movies we surround ourselves with during the season are reservoirs for us all. Christmas marks the landscape of our past.
And inevitably, the richest memories are of childhood. These are the most potent. Good or bad, they can be overcome, but never forgotten.
So when we think about Christmas movies, so many of us associate with the films we saw, mostly on TV, during all those years as we anxiously awaited the big day. These films were the markers of the season: we knew what was coming when they appeared on our home screens.
Holiday films have a unique place in our culture: they may only be on our radar for a short time each year, but they have a long, long, shelf life. Multiple generations, each in their own time, become familiar and fall in love with the same films – unusual in our throw-away pop culture world.
In some families, three generations have cried each in turn, at the end of Minelli’s Meet Me In St. Louis (1944). Made during the Second World War to prop up the home front and champion small-town America over the urban goliath, it is the high-water mark of the MGM golden age.
And while some believe that there is a law in America that all citizens MUST watch It’s A Wonderful Life (1939) several times each season – it’s not a law, actually, it’s just a suggestion. It’s A Wonderful Life is not my favorite Christmas film, although yes, I admit it is inevitably on in the background somewhere between American Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. To me it’s always been a document about a lost America. I prefer holiday films that are not so much about Christmas as they are about the way in which the holiday connects us to American material culture, allowing us a window to time-capsule values — Christmas presence with our Christmas presents.
Looking for a few other holiday films? I offer these for your consideration:
Little Women (1933, 1939, 1994) I like all three-film versions, but most especially Gillian Armstrong’s gentle 1994 incarnation. Period films often get history wrong, but they often tell us a great deal about the moment in which they were made. Unlike the other versions, played for comedy, Armstrong’s captures best the spirit and melancholy of the Alcott novel, itself an exercise in memory.
Since You Went Away (1944) The granddaddy of all four-handkerchief films, this splendid movie about the home front (“The Indelible Fortress, the American Home”, an opening title card tells us) boasts a wonderful ensemble cast, and is a black and white minor masterpiece from the Selznick studio, even including it’s sad window into race relations in mid-forties America. An American Studies feast! Bring your tissues.
I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) It’s not an accident that so many holiday-themed films were made during the war. All of them served to remind viewers about what the fight was about. This film of William Dieterle‘s is sentimental, yes, but puts together two interesting subjects from the late war period that emerged as post-world war two ‘issues’: Freud and working women. A soldier, on holiday furlough from a hospital where he is being treated for ‘psycho-neurological trauma’ (Joseph Cotton) meets and falls in love with a woman on furlough from prison. Ginger Rogers). Her crime? Manslaughter; for fighting off a boss who assaulted her.
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) As cited above, Meet Me… is MGM magic; Judy Garland, four seasons, and a world’s fair. A nostalgic view of Americana that
is topped only by Orson Welles masterpiece, The Magnificent
Ambersons (1942) in its hagiographic praise of time past.
Here’s my take on the multiple incarnations of A Christmas Carol —
there are two with a special place in my heart: the 1951 version of the classic, and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), a work with just enough parody and humor to sweep away the cobwebs of the old Dickens tale. When it was published in mid-1840’s Victorian England, A Christmas Carol was a book that re-kindled celebration of the ancient holiday and helped to launch the Christmas industry.
The Snowman (1982) is an animation masterpiece with a haunting score, guaranteed to touch the most cynical heart.
But whether it is the series of animated Christmas stories that began filling the airwaves in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: Frosty (1968), ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (1968), Rudolph (1964), or the Peanuts classic A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), to cite just a few, there is something about the innocence of these sentimental pieces that tell us something about how we once saw ourselves, before jaded cynicism declared them to be irrelevant.
Irrelevant? Humbug! My memory bank tells me otherwise. Go ahead. Turn off your cell phone and blackberry, turn down the lights, and give yourself an evening with your ghosts – a seasonal meditation of times past, to take in without guilt!