The ABC Family marathon has come to occupy an important place in the hall of American television, and I rest easy knowing that the world will not judge me for being sucked into watching all eight Harry Potter films in a row. However, the greater power that has come into the American psyche is the advent of the Christmas movie marathon, and each year I find myself hard-pressed to get into a festive mood unless I watch my personal favorite Christmas special, The Year Without a Santa Claus. It is one of many films that belongs to the great tradition of animated holiday specials and stands out, to me, as the paragon of Christmas movies. A few years ago, I adopted the mindset that The Year Without a Santa Claus is the most underrated Rankin/Bass special, and it is a great misfortune of Christmas culture that it is overshadowed by the much more popular and dreadfully over-hyped Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Since then, the presence of holiday movies in Western culture has fascinated me, and evaluation of the value of holiday movies has crept into my brain like Saint Nick himself inching down a chimney.

Although certainly not the first production company to make a holiday special, Rankin/Bass Productions Inc. is a household name for the animated holiday TV movie. The company established itself with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964, and continued making TV specials into the 1980’s. In its heyday, it was responsible for other well-known specials such as Frosty the Snowman and The Little Drummer Boy. They produced TV specials for holidays such as Easter and Halloween as well, with titles like Here Comes Peter Cottontail and Mad Monster Party?, but the studio made and kept its name with its Christmas specials. The timing was right for Rankin/Bass, as the market for children’s entertainment had moved away from the silver screen. Children’s film specialist Noel Brown regards this moment as significant, noting that the built-in national audience of US network television had “colonized the family market.” With a demand for family entertainment in television, Rankin/Bass’s Christmas specials prospered, and this allowed the American TV to become a conduit for Christmas specials and feature films alike.

With a market as niche and demanding as the Christmas film industry, the door is left wide open for networks to run the same movies over and over, curating the nation’s yuletide entertainment as they do so. A movie like A Christmas Story is the marker of the seasonal movie marathon factory. It was originally a box office and critical flop, panned for being incohesive and only mildly amusing. Turner Broadcasting gave the film a second life on TV and its increasing airtime on TNT garnered it significant popularity. By 1997 it had become such a staple that it was granted its own 24-hour marathon nearly each year since on both TNT and TBS. A Christmas Story is widely considered a sleeper film, having brought praise from audiences and critics alike with time, and cementing the film as a Christmas classic.

The very nature of the holiday movie asks that you only watch it at a specific time of year, and the attachment to a holiday implies ritual, so when you engage with a Christmas movie at Christmastime you inherently embody a holiday tradition, whether you choose to do so or not. Since holiday movies are most available and topical during the peak season of their respective holidays, it only makes sense for you to watch those movies at those times and do it that way every year. This repetition demands one of two responses from you — annoyance or nostalgia. With replay of A Christmas Story you can either challenge the considerable airtime it has received or accept its place in the holiday movie canon with time. It requires polarizing reactions, and either of them build the culture surrounding the very question of its repetition. Whether you choose to scorn or praise the film, you build its iconicity by having an opinion, further allowing it to remain in the circuit that continuously broadcasts it.

So, Christmas movies have ceased to just be about the rituals of Christmas and instead become a ritual in themselves. This is ironic, as one of the major themes of Christmas movies is doubt of the very existence of Santa Claus. Take Elf, The Polar Express, A Miracle on 34th Street, and even my personal favorite, The Year Without a Santa Claus. Each of these movies is distinctly pro-Santa, but every single one must establish a doubt in Santa before winning back the ground it gives. In The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa decides to take a year off from delivering Christmas presents because he thinks no one cares about him anymore, so his elves and wife go on a search for verifiable proof that there is still some Christmas spirit. Movies of the Santa existence category have similar premises — if more people do not believe in Santa Claus then Santa will not be able to do his job. In defense of the holiday’s lore, the Christmas movie ritual questions the lore too. With only so many Christmas narratives to conceivably make, doubt must be stacked against Christmas beliefs so that the Christmas movie ritual may ultimately restore them.

Another category of Christmas film is the anti-materialist genre, and it finds itself playing contradiction as well. A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas send messages that defy the physical fluff that has instilled itself in the Christmas tradition. How the Grinch Stole Christmas chronicles one creature’s abject hatred and destruction of Christmas, only to find that he had attacked the institutions surrounding the holiday, but not Christmas itself. The Grinchian message is one of anti-materialist sensibility. “What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!” By the movie’s end the Grinch is a new defender of the Christmas tradition (with understanding that the holiday is not just about stuff), and the story makes its moral about the Grinch’s heart growing in size instead; the notion of being surrounded by loved ones is held higher than the stuff that surrounds it. But the culture of Christmas movies also demands that Christmas classics be revamped and repackaged every couple decades, ensuring the continued profit off of an unchanging narrative, and occasionally corrupting the very stories being sold — such is the case with this 1966 animated classic, having been remade twice since the original movie debuted. In fact, the promotion for the 2018 film has teamed up with 23andMe, a DNA analysis service, in order to advertise for both the new movie and genetic testing without adding apparent value to either product. You find yourself hard-pressed to avoid the capitalist glare of the new Benedict Cumberbatch Grinch sarcastically urging you to buy pistachios from Bristol Farms. The new Grinch becomes a symbol for the very materialism that the old Grinch once resisted; the cult of the Christmas movie taints the very tradition it simultaneously worships, unaware of the deep irony of the contradicting messages, blinded by the money it makes off of them.

I think the struggle of the Christmas movie is to exist in a market that demands pure financial value against a requirement for the movies themselves to espouse values of love, selflessness, and magic. What the Christmas movie is meant to achieve is lost in the filter of Christmas movie canonicity, and you simply cannot peacefully drink hot cocoa to the Christmas movie cult’s deafening inconsistency. And this is where the anti-Christmas movie steps in, subverting our expectations of what is appropriate festive filmography, and undoing some of the hypocrisy of the Christmas pastime. Movies like Krampus, Gremlins, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and even A Christmas Story belong to this category, challenging your ideation of the Christmas narrative that has become corrupted by its own vehicle. A Christmas Story’s Ralphie solely occupies himself with getting an air gun for Christmas, to the general disdain of all the adults around him, who tell him he would hurt himself, but his parents ultimately relent and give him the present. They are right to warn him of the danger, as Ralphie breaks his glasses upon receiving the gift, but the film ends on an older Ralphie fondly remembering it and calling it the best gift he had ever or would ever receive. A Christmas Story, in contrast with the majority of the Christmas movie marathon, encourages the materialist aspect of the holiday and mocks the entire family unit. If notions of family purity and magic are present in the Christmas tradition, they do not come through in this narrative, which features the father winning a sexy lamp and one of Ralphie’s friends getting his tongue frozen stuck to a pole. The marker of the anti-Christmas Christmas movie is an element of realism, or outright elimination of the mythos of Christmas. This category of Christmas movie may break the mold, but it is not exempt from the same overhype that befalls the rest of the Christmas movie canon, as A Christmas Story shows. Regard this category, then, not as opposition to the ritual of the cult of the Christmas movie, but merely an extension of it. You may not be the type to watch Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas each year, preferring to partake in Scrooged, but only proving that this sort of opposition is a facet of the culture, and then, the cult of the Christmas movie.

Perhaps with the conflating factor of a culture that worships mediocre Christmas movies, there is no possibility for a sanctity of Christmas entertainment at all. Since any modicum of success garnered by a Christmas movie places it into the limited anthology, it becomes difficult to judge the genuine value of the movie. Is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer a good movie, or has your opinion been clouded by a hazy mix of ritual, nostalgia, and eggnog? (I’ll give you a hint: the movie is not good)

I propose two approaches to evaluating the strength of a Christmas movie:

Remove Christmas from your judgement. I want to be clear that I mean from your judgement alone — any Christmas movie that can make sense without the context of Christmas is not a Christmas movie (Sorry, Die Hard). Is the movie actually enjoyable if you remove it from the cult that creates its notoriety? If when you remove every single time you have watched it while wrapping presents from your psyche and the movie still stands, then it follows that you have placed value in the film that TBS and ABC Family definitely did not put there. Still, I wonder if this method is untrue to the very fiber of a Christmas movie. “How can I evaluate a Christmas movie for its quality without considering that context that qualifies it?” It’s a good question, which is why I suggest a second approach as well.

Evaluate a Christmas movie for what it says about the holiday. I won’t deny that it proves more difficult to apply this method when the genre of the holiday movie can be at times so absurd, but it gives deference to the nature of the genre while still striving to avoid the culture that bears it. It can be complicated. And when you finally resolve that Frosty the Snowman is about the magic of Christmas as well as vague anti-semitism, you see the reality of the stories that have been forced into your winter tradition. And you discover certain paternalism of the Christmas story that pervades many of its films. The figure of Santa Claus flies over a wealth of Christmas movies as a pseudo father, and the practice of male caretaking becomes the primary anxiety of the Christmas movie. Love Actually, Elf, and Home Alone all deal with absent parents, specifically the absence of a male parent figure, and movies like Frosty the Snowman, The Polar Express, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and Miracle on 34th Street all feature male figures taking care of or being incredibly generous and kind to young children. The 2000 remake of How the Grinch Stole Christmas even features the Grinch’s parents — two lesbian moms, and no father. The Christmas movie is as riddled with anxiety over the absent father as it is with the existence of Santa Claus.

I can’t help but suspect that the Christmas film tradition has become obsessed with themes such as this for more than the themes themselves. In evaluating a film canon of one religious holiday, there is a noticeable lack of the religion present. Being personally areligious, I recognize the way that Christmas has adapted itself into an American holiday, rather than a Christian one, but its roots have retained an anxiety about fathers, and the doubts sown into the holiday echo the religious doubt that it contains. In the Christmas movie canon only The Little Drummer Boy seems to reference the nativity, and it is not even a very well-loved film. We prefer our Christmas movies have weird religious subtext, and as with Frosty, some coded religious discrimination.

So the institution of the Christmas movie eludes evaluation, leaving each individual struggling to understand which parts of the holiday tradition are worth their time. I can’t precisely describe why I love The Year Without a Santa Claus, somewhere in the midst of the jazz numbers it became lost, and it leaves me reeling for some sort of metric which I can hold against this prolific holiday rite. I find clarity in films like It’s A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, which both tap into themes of Christmas magic, selflessness and love, and life in review. By utilizing the uncanny supernatural aura surrounding the holidays, each movie shows its characters garner understanding about their influence on others (good and bad). They achieve revelations with what they see during these odd Christmas miracles. The Christmas lens obscures the ability to qualify Christmas movies as well as the holiday itself. But we find that the Christmas lens lets us look at our lives and the lives of those around us with profound clarity. Something about its aura supersedes its amorphous meaning and the culture’s own hypocrisy — we find personal insight through the tradition anyhow. So if you fill your Decembers with a litany of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, allowing you to reflect and finding that it brings you awareness, that is a tradition I cannot rightly criticize.

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