Define "Christmas movie"? OK, define "Christmas"

Film critic Steven D. Greydanus makes things more complex (with help from C.S. Lewis)

OK, some of you may be asking: What is a video about fruitcake doing at the top of this post about Christmas?

That’s rather obvious. Eating fruitcake is, for kazillions of folks, a Christmas “tradition.” Oh, does anyone know a recipe for fruitcake that uses almonds or peanuts instead of pecans or walnuts? Asking for a friend.

What does fruitcake have to do with the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Nothing, that I can ascertain. Fruitcake just sits there on a plate like a dense, heavy, strange condensed cultural symbol of something or another that says “Christmas” or, for many, “The Holidays.”

Now, here’s the reason that I bring this up. During my recent Nativity Lent talks at our home parish in Northeast Tennessee, I discussed the many ways that families (converts to Orthodox Christianity, for example) develop their own Christmas timelines that stress the liturgical rites leading up to the actual Christmas season and the cultural season that swirls around them, beginning well before Thanksgiving.

That included a discussion of “Christmas movies.” I urged parents to pick a few family favorites and dive in. I made a case, of course, for “The Muppet Christmas Carol.” So there.

Ah, but what is a “Christmas movie”? That was the topic that I discussed in this recent post: “‘Die Hard’ is not a Christmas movie, unless.” In the past few days, I have had an email discussion of that topic with the noted Catholic film critic (and permanent deacon) Steven D. Greydanus. He proposed, from my point of view, an additional category to my “Christmas movie” typology, which he called the “functional or socio-cultural category.”

In effect, he argued that there are movies that — for some people — are like fruitcakes. They are linked to Christmas because people link them to “Christmas,” defined in terms of culture.

Hold that thought. As you can see, the question has evolved. To define the term “Christmas movie,” we need to define “Christmas.” As opposed to Festivus or similar cultural creations?

Maybe. Maybe not. That’s up to the individual, you see. This is America (and the modern world in general).

For starters, here is my original typology again.

We are talking about moves that:

(1) Are set during Christmas, sort of, and that’s that. See “Die Hard.” See (#ducking) “White Christmas.”

(2) Offer waves of smarmy images and themes linked to generic love, family, snow, food, forgiveness, gift giving, hope, Santa, children and lots and lots of decorations. Did I miss something? Yes, there are many advertisements that offer mini-takes on the same formula (see this instant classic from 2023).

(3) Include actual religious content linked to the Christmas season, running along a spectrum from the original “Home Alone” to “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

(4) Would-be epics that include or focus on the Christmas story.

That’s still my list, and I stand by it. However, I think I may need to do some tweaking to category No. 1.

Why? To answer that, start by reading this: “Steven D. Greydanus’ Top 10 Christmas movies list! [The Truth].” Here is the heart of that ridiculous (in a good way) essay by the good deacon. You will want to read the original to read all the footnotes.

This list is definitive and authoritative, I will not be taking questions.

(1) Here is the hard, cold truth about Christmas movies: There are none. At all. True fact! Like Santa himself, Christmas movies do not exist.¹

(2) Having said that, there is, of course, one and only one Christmas movie: It’s a Wonderful Life. That is literally the only Christmas movie, that’s it.

(3) Except for also The Muppet Christmas Carol, and nothing against your favorite Christmas Carol adaptation, which is almost certainly good too,² because nearly all of them are.³

(4) And yes of course Die Hard, get over it everyone.

(5) There is no 5, just those three, the end.

(6) A Charlie Brown Christmas is not a “movie” but otherwise yes also that obviously.⁴

(7) Honestly, I’m not even hating on other “Christmas movies,” from White Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, and March of the Wooden Soldiers to A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and Elf, please feel free to enjoy these also.⁵

(8) Except for Love Actually which I am literally hating on. Even some of you fans, if you’re honest, seem to have a Stockholm syndrome–type⁶ relationship with the film, like “It’s terrible actually but I watch it every year.” My friends: You don’t have to let Alan Rickman hurt you any more.⁷

(9) Also hating on any and all Christmas-adjacent movies featuring Tim Allen, yes all of them hate hate hate.⁸

(10) The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween movie. What on earth is wrong with you?

Now, SDG’s machine-gun approach takes many movies that I would put in my four categories and judges them with his own thumbs up-thumbs down rulings. He’s talking about his family Christmas timeline, you see.

What’s going on?

This brings us to the whole “fruitcake” thing. Saith Greydanus, in this excerpt from our online discussion:

I propose another category of “Christmas movie”: a functional or socio-cultural category.

What makes fruitcake a Christmas treat? Simply that it has long been traditionally eaten at Christmas, and — as unpopular as it is in many quarters — is nevertheless widely associated in the minds of many with Christmas. (Despite its checkered reputation, many people do love it, and their claim is the greater.)

In a similar spirit, it seems to me that movies that, for whatever reason, are very widely enjoyed at Christmastime, and widely associated in the minds of many with Christmas, may reasonably be considered Christmas movies.

I realize that this throws open the floodgates to people claiming anything as a “Christmas movie,” at least for themselves. So be it. Chinese food isn’t my Christmas tradition, but it’s a Christmas tradition for many Jewish people, and just because they don’t celebrate Christmas doesn’t mean they don’t get a say.

Concerning “Die Hard,” he adds:

I would … point out the internal evidence that Die Hard was intended from the beginning to make enjoyable Christmas viewing. To quote one of my pieces on Christmas movies:

“ … There are indications that, despite its release date, its Christmas trimmings were always intended as more than just window dressing — that it was always meant to work as an unconventional Christmas movie. Take the early scene in the limo: “Don’t you got any Christmas music?” John McClane asks when Argyle cranks the Run-DMC. Argyle’s reply: “This is Christmas music!” What that cut (“Christmas in Hollis”) is to Christmas music, Die Hard is to Christmas movies. Even Argyle’s name is a nod to seasonal festiveness, along with, of course, that of Holly, John’s wife.

Despite its violent action milieu, Die Hard is deliberately cheerful, escapist fun (director John McTiernan has said the decision to make the bad guys thieves rather than terrorists was intended to keep it light). And, in the same way that Home Alone is as much about embracing the misunderstood outcast and overcoming divisions (Old Man Marley and his estranged family) as it is about a young boy defending his home against burglars, Die Hard is as much about a couple in a troubled marriage reuniting to spend Christmas as a family with their kids as it is about a lone cop battling a team of slick criminals. (It has even been argued that Die Hard and Home Alone are essentially the same movie.)”

Well, the f-word at the heart of “Die Hard” is not Festivus, which will matter to some of us parental types. The key word in “The Muppet Christmas Carol” is “sinner,” if I remember correctly. But I digress.

I responded with this:

So that includes my Category No. 1 -- but expands it to say people basically do what they want to do?

The idea of things ASSOCIATED with Christmas raises the whole issue of Christmas Inc. So much of what you see at a shopping mall or other secular centers is stuff that actually isn't linked to Christmas, other than the fact that people have created a new version of Christmas that doesn't include the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Correct?

Dang it, Greydanus came back with some relevant material from C.S. Lewis, of all people. Don’t you hate it when people do that?

The key: There are forms of “cultural Christmas” that — to use my Nativity Lent image — deserve to be included in our family timelines and others that do not (yes, that is a judgemental statement).

Thus, here is the key part of the SDG response in which all those fruitcakes become totally relevant to the cultural Christmas discussion.

According to C.S. Lewis, there are not two sides of Christmas, but three. He named them as (a) “a religious festival,” (b) “a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality,” and (c) “the commercial racket.” The first, Lewis said, is “important and obligatory for Christians”; the third he condemned; of the second he wrote, “If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making.”

Despite Lewis’s approval of merry-making and hospitality, he and Chesterton took different views of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which Chesterton enthusiastically embraced precisely as a defense of Christmas — not in the sense that Dickens defended what Christians celebrate at Christmas, but in the sense that he defended how Christians celebrate it — that is, merry-making and hospitality. It is, Chesterton wrote, a mystery, almost a divine joke, that Dickens, a "bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch," was at the same time so ardent about "defending the mince-pies and the mummeries of Christmas." For Chesterton, Dickens "was fighting for the old European festival," Christmas being "one of numberless old European feasts of which the essence is the combination of religion with merry-making."

In the end, Greydanus notes:

What you see at the shopping mall and other secular centers is largely, I think, what Lewis condemned as “the commercial racket.” That I gather with family and friends every year in late December to enjoy It’s a Wonderful Life, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard is a matter of “merry-making and hospitality” — “Christmas” in the second rather than the third of Lewis’s three categories, and, for us, as much a part of what Chesterton defended in A Christmas Carol in regard to how we celebrate what we celebrate as Christmas dinner, Christmas cookies and other Christmas treats.

I get that. In my typology, I would note that there is more faith-friendly content in “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “The Muppet Christmas Carol” than there is in, well, “Die Hard.”

However, it’s clear that not all elements of a cultural take on “Christmas” are created equal, from the viewpoint of Christian parents who are trying to create a family timeline for the season that is both holy and jolly.

Correct? What are your thoughts, gentle readers?