An impossible quest for the definitive Christmas movie

season's musings.

‘Tis the season for the perennial question—what’s your favourite Christmas movie? Or maybe—what is the most Christmassy movie? Or perhaps this fun iteration—is _____ a Christmas movie? (The most recent movie to get that last treatment seems to be Coming to America, and honestly, I’m a bit skeptical about its Christmas bonafides.)

The question of what makes a Christmas movie is a fascinating one, partly because it’s unanswerable on a collective level. We have a shared understanding of what makes a romcom—it’s right there in the title, for one thing—even if we differ on what makes something romantic or comedic. But we don’t have a shared understanding of what makes a Christmas movie. So all of our answers are different.

And it’s not just that everyone has a different answer to the question. Everyone has a different reason for answering the question the way they do. Some people want to have the most comprehensively Christmassy answer. Some people are describing the movie that comforts them the most during the season. Some people want to name the most pointedly incongruous answer, so they can explain how tEcHnIcAlLy it DOES count.

Leather fetishwear counts because wearing it is a gift.

So this is my attempt to tease out the qualifications and motivations that go into defining Christmas movies. I’m sure y’all will let me know if I leave something crucial out.

• Timing
  On its face, this one should be a slam dunk qualification. December in the movies is often a cozy, twinkly time, perfect for romance like Love, Actually or family dramedy like The Family Stone. But the timing alone doesn’t guarantee Christmassy vibes. Shane Black famously sets most of his movies (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys) around Christmastime, and those movies all openly defy that cozy twinkly feeling. Relatedly, Coming to America takes place in the winter. But there are no Christmas decorations at the McDowell’s house party, nobody mentions any holidays, and it’s missing a certain overall vibe needed to convince me to consider it as a Christmas movie.
  

• Themes

  Let’s get specific about the vibes, then. Presumably, for something to be a Christmas movie, it should have relevant themes. Secular themes like togetherness, compassion, and love; but also explicitly Christian themes about piety and baby Jesus. (Santa Claus straddles the line.) That sharpens the focus on movies like A Muppet Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life, which is helpful. But it also opens us up to, like, Kirk Cameron movies, and The Passion of the Christ.
  
  On the flip side, there are still those movies that seek to subvert Christmassy themes, but in so doing, provide comfort to people who struggle with ‘the Christmas spirit.’ Here’s where you get things like Bad Santa, Nightmare Before Christmas, and personal fave Black Christmas (1974). (There is an absolutely thriving Christmas horror sub-genre.) There are even movies that manage to both subvert and lean in to the Christmas spirit, balancing a relatable tartness about the stresses of the season with an irrepressible sentimental energy. That’s where movies like The Apartment and Home Alone fit. They’re great for when you don’t want to feel like you’re getting slapped in the face with a glittery Hallmark card, but you’re still interested in some hard-earned seasonal cheer.

  

  Jack Lemmon just told Santa here the plot of The Apartment.

• Tradition

  Then, there are those movies that people watch around Christmastime, more out of personal or family tradition than out of devotion to a seasonal theme. They may still be seasonally appropriate, like When Harry Met Sally (very much a New Year’s Eve movie in my book); or they may be pointedly incongruent, like Edward Scissorhands. They may have non-secular themes, like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or The Sound of Music. Or maybe they just have absolutely killer outerwear, as is the case with The Devil Wears Prada. Numerous people have named Star Wars and Harry Potter to me as their seasonal franchise faves, even though Harry Potter is a whole witch. The point is, some movies just become Christmas movies by association rather than intention.
  

• Technicalities
  Again, sometimes a person wants an answer to “what’s your favourite Christmas movie?” that upends the perceived intention behind the question. Maybe they genuinely want to expand the scope of how we think about Christmas movies. Maybe they don’t entirely relate to the question, so they prefer to come at it from an odd angle. Maybe they’re just irony-pilled. Thankfully for us all, the whole “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” joke became so ubiquitous that people have generally moved on to answers that still have the capacity to surprise.

The real deadly sins are the heads we met along the way.

Still, the pointedly incongruous choice does help us a little. It reveals what the person making it associates with a mainstream definition of a Christmas movie. Whatever those associations are, they run perpendicular to the pointedly incongruous movie. But this is as close as I can get to that mainstream definition.

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Just to further illustrate my point, I quite literally illustrated my point. In a five-circle Venn diagram, no less!

(A word on this graphic—I very much know that this image is not to scale. Some of the circles should be much bigger, to accommodate more overlap. Some should be smaller. Maybe circles was the wrong way to go altogether. But the different factions of my OCD went to war with each other over this, and the symmetry faction won. Here you are.)

And you? What is your favourite Christmas movie?