MoxVib

It’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a Scrooge during the holiday season. As my wife rushes to put the Christmas tree up the day after Thanksgiving, stringing up lights and hanging up Hallmarks, I’m grumbling in the corner and keeping an eye on the TV. It’s not that different from childhood, when I would retreat to the basement in order to avoid the yearly decoration rush. Between the ornaments and the shopping and the carols and the cookies, all that happiness and joy and fellowship with man is a bit much for me to take.

Ironically, though, I love Christmas movies. Not the cheesy Hallmark Channel ones with titles like “Ice Sculpture Christmas” and “’Tis the Season for Love,” mind you. (I’m soulless, but I’m not a monster.) I’m talking about the mainstream, big-budget, basic cable classics that get thrown on repeat this time of year. I’m talking about “Elf” and “Scrooged,” about “Bad Santa” and “Miracle on 34th Street,” about “Home Alone” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”*

I’m talking, perhaps most of all, about “A Christmas Story.” There’s no other Christmas movie I love quite so much as the 1983 classic about a little scamp named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) and his quest for a Red Rider BB gun. A perfect mix of sardonic and silly with a pinch of nostalgia that transcends decades, “A Christmas Story” simply feels like Yuletime.

Advertisement

That warm fuzzy feeling comes about in no small part due to the now-annual “24 Hours of A Christmas Story.” As I noted in my essay for “The Christmas Virtues,”** TNT began running the film for a whole day — beginning Christmas Eve, continuing on through the night as visions of Santa’s bounty danced through the heads of little ones, available for mid-afternoon viewing if Christmas Day NBA games aren’t your style — in 1997. While the channel has changed (TBS has taken up the marathon), the event itself has been running strong for almost 20 years now.

My love for “A Christmas Story” is, in part, a function of familiarity; I’ve seen it enough times to know exactly what is going on wherever in the film I happen to turn it on. Its episodic nature — often a nearly unforgivable sin in feature filmmaking — makes for easy entry and exit as the hours tick on. For a secular humbug such as myself, there’s something quite lovely about the ritual of the thing: the repetition, the tradition. It’s not exactly a midnight Mass presided over by the pope, but we heathens need our rites, too.

The best part of that ritual, to my mind, is a calming of the nerves, a cease to family hostilities. Much fun was had at the expense of earnest liberals and Democratic Party apparatchiks who endeavored to fill the heads of millennials with Vox-approved talking points so they could destroy their bigoted Trump-supporting uncles at the Thanksgiving table. These pieces were hilariously overwrought and remarkably easy to mock, but they did remind us of an ugly truth: Too many people have no idea how to talk to their loved ones in a reasonable, responsible manner. And, as a result, many family gatherings devolve into ugly sniping over just which evil politician of the other party is devising the nastiest thing to do to people you affiliate with.

Advertisement

“24 Hours of a Christmas Story” — or whichever Christmas classic your family has settled upon — can serve as an armistice of sorts, a multi-generational bonding tool that gets people to shut up about immigration or the Islamic State or excessive levels of deodorant choice for a couple of hours.

And this may be what I love most about holiday movies. It’s not their aesthetic qualities I care about as much as their anesthetic qualities. Christmas movies have charms to soothe the savage siblings.

*I am not talking about “Die Hard.” And I actually kind of hate the constant fighting about “Die Hard’s” status as a (non-) Christmas movie, because it distracts from the harmony holiday movies are designed to bring.

**Available now at your friendly neighborhood Amazon, “The Christmas Virtues” is the epic conclusion to Jonathan V. Last’s “Virtues Trilogy.” It features new essays on the holiday season from Christopher Buckley, P.J. O’Rourke, Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash and other noted right-of-center wordsmiths. As might be expected, I probably enjoyed Rob Long’s essay “In Defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge” most of all.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JomJysXZu8tr6OsKdoamBmgnB9kWhna2eXmsG1tc2gZK2goqTCqLSMrZ%2BeZZikuaqwwLKqZq%2BZqbVurYyloK2snJp6qbHLqWSfqp%2BierOty6mfop1dlruledKcqainl5p8