"Christmas time is here; we'll be drawing near; oh, that we could always see; such spirit through the year"
Saying ‘I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas’ is as much a tradition as the holiday itself. So- I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas. One peril of the working world is how much days run together. You wake up at the same time every morning, match one of six dress shirts to one of three pairs of dress pants, make the same commute on the same roads to the same building and suddenly it’s a new year. I’m not alone in needing those little moments to break the routine, so the holidays hold a bit of extra weight in a year devoid of some of our usual bright spots.
I’m going to go out on a very short, sturdy (honestly probably really a stump) limb and say movies hold a larger place in Christmas traditions than any other holiday. You can’t swing a poorly constructed, handmade ornament without hitting a list ranking the 397 best Christmas movies by actor, romance, soundtrack, memorable quote, or (as I stumbled on this morning), traveling prowess. I’m going to be surprised if anyone made it this far without thinking of a moment watching a holiday movie with a loved one or a particularly disinterested pet.
All that said- I won’t offer an opinion on whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie (it is) or the best storyline in Love Actually (Liam Neeson and Thomas Sangster). Instead I’ll touch on why certain stories resonate more strongly with me. My family didn’t celebrate Christmas when I was a kid. I won’t say Christmas wasn’t a part of our life- it’s so firmly embedded in Americana that even our ‘non-traditional’ celebration (a movie theater and Chinese food) was a tradition in and of itself. I had a few years where my AIM away message on Christmas Eve was the last line of A Visit from Saint Nicholas (Comic Sans, teal writing on a midnight blue background, but we don’t need to get into that). That aside Christmas was (and still is, despite my marrying into it) more of an outside looking in experience for me.
I never resented that perspective. We had our celebrations, you had yours. Only- Christmas is gorgeous, wonderful, and (at least to a kid with his nose pressed slightly longingly against the window) a little bit cold. Christmas was always this beautiful, slightly melancholy ‘other’ in the periphery of my life. Think the feel of ‘Christmas Time is Here’ by the Peanuts gang, quoted at the top of this post. But in spite of all that I wanted so badly for those who celebrated to appreciate what I thought it could be.
With all that, my favorite Christmas stories are always those where someone lives that moment I put on a pedestal; finding true, unadulterated joy in the holiday. It doesn’t matter what sparks that joy. I don’t need it to be ‘discovering the true meaning of Christmas’ or the ‘triumph of love over capitalism.’ I just need it to be joy. Give me How the Grinch Stole Christmas! where every Who down in Whoville joins hands and sings. A Christmas Story when the The Old Man nudges Ralphie toward that last present he’d squirreled away. Elf when the group of bystanders starts caroling outside Central Park. The Nightmare Before Christmas (I’m counting it, hush) when Jack revels in that moment, just a moment, where he touched the sky.
Most of all though, give me A Sorcerer’s Stone when Harry had his first Christmas at Hogwarts. I have a lot to say on JKR, and I promise I’ll get to it in a later post. But for now, take that 11-year-old kid who so obviously wears his heart on his sleeve, a kid who’s undergone a decade of abuse, locked away and made to feel he doesn’t matter. A kid who has never been able to feel part of anything and give him a warm fire, a cozy common room, and a best friend whose mother loved both of them enough to knit this perfect stranger a Weasley sweater, and I’ll call it my perfect Christmas movie moment.
Have a Christmas movie moment that sticks with you? Let me know. But in the meanwhile, from my family to yours:
"Happy Christmas, Harry." "Happy Christmas, Ron."
Twenty-five Hundred Stories 