Christmas movies give us all the warm fuzzies but beneath all the mistletoe and caroling, Ho-Ho-Hollywood may have some tricks up its sleeve
By Ella Miller
Even when you’re on the threshold of holiday hell, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye (and the Hollywood propaganda machine) will always be there for you. (via Wikimedia Commons)
In 1898, hypnotist George Albert Smith created the first Christmas movie. Smith’s Santa Claus is just over a minute long, and through the crackling celluloid, a story unfolds that has remained unchanged since the 19th century.
Santa Claus’ Victorian-era predecessors–literary works like A Christmas Carol–did much to influence how we celebrate the holiday.
“Prior to the nineteenth century Christmas was a far more public holiday, typified by rowdy festivities, misrule, and community celebration,” Melodie Roschman outlines in her article, “‘Now I Have a Machine Gun, Ho-Ho-Ho’: Masculinity, Family, and Redemptive Violence in Home Alone and Die Hard,” published in 2023 in the Comparative American Studies An International Journal.
She continues that during this period, “governments and institutions sought to recreate Christmas as a genteel, civilized celebration of home and family,” with whimsical, good-natured media being a tool used in this transformation.
Christmas movies, in this way, are the successors to the regularly scheduled ye olde government-sanctioned holiday literature. They serve as protectors of the status quo and tools to inform viewers on how to uniformly construct a ‘perfect’ Christmas.
Following Santa Claus, theatres, rather fittingly, saw a slew of Christmas Carol adaptations as the go-to festive story on screen: Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), A Christmas Carol (1908), A Christmas Carol (1910), Scrooge (1913), yet another Christmas Carol in 1923 and 1938 and three more movies simply titled Scrooge in 1922, 1928 and 1935.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that people finally got tired of watching remakes of a one-hundred-year-old Charles Dickens book and forced Hollywood to come up with something original.
This did not stop at least 15 more A Christmas Carols from being made (though one of those has Muppets in it), two more Scrooge’s and one past tense Scrooged that thought it was doing something there.
The modern Christmas movie emerged around the advent of the Second World War with Holiday Inn (1942), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).
“The sentimental images and customs associated with Christmas represented ideals most threatened by war—peace, family, abundance, tradition—and the retail and entertainment industries were quick to recognize and deploy Christmas as both a narrative and a marketing strategy [...]” writes Carolyn Sigler in the article “‘I'll Be Home for Christmas’: Misrule and the Paradox of Gender in World War II-Era Christmas Films,” published in 2005 in the Journal of American Culture.
The soundtracks packaged with such films were so impactful that they became the soundtracks to Christmas itself. Particularly Holiday Inn, which features Irving Berlin’s immensely popular “White Christmas” and “Happy Holiday” and Meet Me in St. Louis’ “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”
These movies are now shorthand for what a perfect Christmas is, and their popularity would eventually signal the integration of reverence for the past as a requirement of the Christmas mood.
“Each of these holiday-themed films offers not so much a journey into the past as a self-conscious, celebratory journey into invented tradition, as the characters travel to and experience the rural, quaintly old-fashioned scenes depicted in Victorian Christmas cards,” Sigler adds.
The next big wave of now-classic Christmas movies began in the 1980s with A Christmas Story (1983) and, within a period lasting until the mid-90s, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), Home Alone (1990), The Santa Clause (1994) and Jingle All the Way (1996) would debut.
It is in these movies that the John Hughes-ification of Christmas takes hold. Hughes wrote Christmas Vacation and Home Alone, injecting those movies with his white upper-class Reaganomic sensibilities; the families live in cushy all-American homes and have the resources to lavish their children with Turbo-Man action figures and Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifles.
Incorporated into this Hughes-ification, is an increased conservatism and loyalty to a past constructed through the films that came before.
“Christmas movies are designed to activate emotional resonance through nostalgia,” writes Pam Rutledge in “Why Christmas Movies Make Us Feel Good.” “They rely on our desire to visit the ‘good old days’ with images, stories, and music that stimulate our sentimental and wistful associations from the past.”
Christmas Vacation is an example of this, weaponizing It’s A Wonderful Life as a way of conveying how wrong compared to the silver screen perfection of Zuzu exclaiming “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings,” the Griswold family Christmas is about to get.
Except it never quite goes entirely wrong, does it? Despite everything–kidnapping the man responsible for your Jelly of the Month Club membership, viciously maiming two burglars, murdering Santa Claus–these stories have happy endings of happy families experiencing the happ-happ-happiest magic of Christmas.
But despite this textbook Hollywood un-realism, people just can’t stop watching the movies that trigger all the warm fuzzies. And studios and advertising firms know this. Christmas movies and their characters are now also a part of the marketing machine that has all but devoured the season.
While researching this article, an ad for OpenTable parodying Love Actually (2003) popped up before a YouTube video. There was also the Google Home ad featuring Macaulay Culkin that went viral a few years ago, those cursed Grinch x Wonderful Pistachio billboards and yet another Love Actually parody that may have made Brexit happen.
At the opposite end of this palatable marketability lies Female Trouble (1974) by beloved purveyor of trash, John Waters. It is, for reasons known only to the sweet baby Jesus himself, included on Wikipedia’s list of Christmas films. Becoming another entry into the ‘there on a technicality’ phenomenon, alongside other alternative films like Gremlins (1984), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and… Die Hard (1988).
The inclusion of horror and action movies on a Christmas movies list is, in this writer’s opinion, somewhat of a desperate cry for a more diverse selection in the media people feel as though they are allowed to watch at Christmas.
Upper-class, upper case-White suburbia is not relatable to many. And, the continuous pressure to only consume movies that reinforce the narrative that this is the most wonderful time of the year can be downright miserable for some.
“Some viewers are looking at the wealth and all the gifts and identifying, and others are looking at the wealth and the gifts and are being made anxious as are their parents in terms of not ‘keeping up with the Joneses’,” says Graeme Metcalf, a sociology professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.
This is not to mention those legitimately absent from holiday movies, like people of colour, LGBTQ folks and practitioners of non-Christian religions. While there are exceptions to these categories, they are few and far between.
And no, slotting a diversity hire into the filmed-in-rural-Ontario Hallmark format does not count.
“The perpetual joy of the season coming down through this Hollywood mechanism is one in which the joy is a white joy and then we see the tokenism of [...] the Black character who may arrive as one of the star’s best friends or colleagues,” says Metcalf.
The Preacher’s Wife (1996), The Best Man Holiday (2013) and A Madea Christmas (2013) showcase the few times Black actors are at the forefront of Christmas stories; Tokyo Godfathers (2003), Carol (2015), Tangerine (2015) and Happiest Season (2020) offer some gay and trans representation; and Jewish people are gifted Eight Crazy Nights (2002) as one of the most mainstream tellings of the Hanukkah story. How lovely.
This all comes back to the status quo. As was the case in the Victorian era and as is the case now, Christmas is simplest when it is packaged for one demographic to enjoy and everyone else to fight for. Scrooges need and deserve to get got by those ghosts. Hollywood needs to change that attitude.
“In order to do that, they’ll have to address social class and poverty and disenfranchisement and marginalization and differing ways family units operate in terms of class and race and gender and sexuality,” says Metcalf. “And so what they would have to do is actually make Christmas movies about people rather than Christmas movies about consumerism.”
The current narrow reality of the holidays peddled through Hollywood propaganda works hand in hand with commercialism to obscure the real reason for the season:
I don’t know… whatever you want it to be.
The whole thing is probably just a farcical diversion made to compete with pagan Yule celebrations. So, attend Midnight Mass, buy a bunch of stuff online, make a billion cookies, sacrifice your neighbour to Krampus, spread goodwill towards men, do nothing at all, or even, watch Die Hard.