Traditions Of Holiday Movies

A Christmas Story

I saw the ad for the 24 hour marathon of A Christmas Story on TBS and I had a few thoughts — which turned out to be pretty cool, because this week’s Monday Movie Meme is about favorite holiday movies.

My first thought was not about how that film, despite it’s having been set decades earlier, seems to ring nostalgic for so many of us (and interesting phenomenon that I do often ponder whenever I think of A Christmas Story, but rather how TBS has turned that film into a different kind of holiday classic…

You know, one of those films you associate with the holidays and family simply because it was on TV every year when you were a kid.

Scene From It's A Wonderful Life

Most of the Christmas movies and television programing hasn’t changed much; we’ve still got the animated Frosty and Rudolph “specials,” and Miracle On 34th Street, It’s A Wonderful Life, etc. Most of these are not as memorable — or more accurately, these films are not as tied to family holiday traditions because at Christmas time, we kids were preoccupied with our gifts. So while I fondly remember Rudolph, The Littlest Angel, and The Little Drummer Boy, I remember those pretty much like any other TV viewing event.

(Even now, watching Miracle or It’s A Wonderful Life is pretty much a solo couch potato event; momma’s down-time in a busy holiday season.)

But there are other holidays too. And television network execs take advantage of this time, programming us along with setting the program schedule.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Film Poster

For me, the phrase “holiday films” brings to mind those I watched with my cousins. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the old console TV, we watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang & Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — I think it was Thanksgiving and Easter, respectively. (And I tried for years to stay up and watch The Ten Commandments at Easter too; only I never made it more than an hour before nodding off.) I do remember that sometime between the time we kids were expected to join adults in conversation and the age at which we became too cool to do so, the TV networks changed the holiday family films. (Don’t ask me what they were. Once my cousins and I mockingly went to watch Willy Wonka, and he wasn’t there.) I guess the network guys and gals had moved onto a younger kid demographic for their ‘new’ holiday family fun.

(This reminded me of the one Mother’s Day that one of the major TV networks ran Rambo or something equally disgusting. I guess the thinking was that men would stick around for family time if they could have a all the action and excitement of body count film to watch. But I digress.)

Thinking of how the films change reminded me that soon enough, TBS will stop running A Christmas Story. And that simple act will change family traditions.

It is this fact, and this alone, that has me finally turning the corner on an area of collecting I have been snobby about: film collecting.

I used to be offended when I had rented a booth in an antique mall and some guy was moving into his booth, stocking it with nothing but VHS cassettes. Those were not collectible, I thought to myself snobbishly. Collections are not simply amounts of something, they represent something more… A collection is more than a stack of movies, a shelf of books, a pile of CDs or iPod full of audio files. A collection, I vehemently believe, is attached to something more than simple consumption of merchandise.

Scene From A Christmas Story

But now, thinking back on all those movies that were once my family’s tradition, I see it differently. If I buy all those movies, they are significantly different than movies I like to have around to watch should the mood strike me. Accumulating the original Willy Wonka & Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a nostalgic act — I’m buying back a bit of my childhood.

So, movie collectors, you have my apologies for having been an ignorant, stuck-up collector. Please don’t make me put my tongue on a flagpole.