Archive for December, 2025

movies

A Christmas Movie or a Movie Set at Christmas?

During my Thanksgiving visit, my brother and I were talking about Christmas movies. He’s something of a traditionalist who has to watch White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life every year. I’m okay with It’s a Wonderful Life because I adore Jimmy Stewart and find that it gets a little more depth from the fact that he essentially used making that movie as a way to deal with the PTSD from his experiences as a bomber pilot in the war, but it’s not something I want to watch regularly. I could be happy never seeing White Christmas again. I remember being horribly disappointed when I finally saw the movie after having heard the song all my life.

I definitely disagree with my brother about his assertion that Die Hard is the best Christmas movie. If it makes you feel holly and jolly and gives you all the warm Christmas feels, then that’s great for you and enjoy it, but I tried watching it as a Christmas movie last year, and it didn’t work that way for me. I think it’s stuck in my head as a summer movie because it was a summer release and I saw it at the theater on my birthday in August.

But thinking about that, I came up with a test for whether a movie is a movie that happens to be set at Christmas or a Christmas movie: Could you move it to another time without changing the story? If you removed the Christmas elements, would the story still work? By that standard, Die Hard would not be a Christmas movie. All you’d have to do is give him another reason to be traveling — say, his daughter’s birthday — and another reason for the office party — like some kind of company milestone. That would even increase the tension with the wife if she had him come to the office so she could manage his reunion with the kids and then he found out she was staying late for a party rather than prioritizing the daughter’s birthday. But most of the action wouldn’t be affected at all and it would take only minor rewriting to change it from Christmas.

By this standard, one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Holiday, also wouldn’t actually be a Christmas movie. I used to watch this one every year on the evening before Christmas Eve, and a few years ago it struck me how small a role Christmas actually plays in the story. Christmas itself is mostly skipped over, with a brief montage of both women eating pasta alone while “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” plays. Most of the movie takes place in the week between Christmas and the new year. The main reason it needs to take place at Christmas is that you need a time both women are able to be away from work to travel for a couple of weeks, and the holiday time has to start for one of the women with a company-wide event. It being winter does help give the contrast between Los Angeles and England, but you’ll have at least some contrast year-round. Christmas is the most obvious, easiest time of year to do that. It would take some handwaving to set it up at another time of year. But the plot itself has nothing really to do with the holiday season. They don’t even do seasonal stuff. It mostly comes down to the vibes in the England side of the story, with the snow on the ground and the cozy cottage. I think I mostly enjoy that movie because a pile of books in a cozy cottage near an English village is my dream vacation. It was a little disappointing to learn that the cottage was a fake shell they built to film the exteriors and the interior was a set in California.

I’ve since moved this one to watch after Christmas. It’s a good thing for that dead week between Christmas and the new year when there’s not much going on and you can kick back and relax after the holiday craziness.

In contrast, most versions of A Christmas Carol would be Christmas movies because it would be difficult to move the story to another time. Scrooge’s attitude is a sharp contrast to the Christmas spirit and is fully illustrated by the way he reacts to Christmas. The ghosts take him to specific Christmas celebrations. There’s an emotional weight to the fact that it’s Christmas and there are societal expectations around it that you don’t get with other holidays. You’d have to do some serious rewriting to set it at any other time.

Now I’m going to be watching Christmas movies with this in mind to see how they measure up. Today would be a good day for Christmas movies because it’s snowing. We were supposed to get maybe three inches, with snow ending in the early morning, but it looks like there are at least four inches and it’s still snowing steadily at 11 a.m. I don’t know how it can clear before the weekend, but fortunately I can walk to the things I need to do. I’ll get to break in the snow boots I bought last winter.

Life

The Journey

I’m back from my Thanksgiving journey, which involved traveling across four states (parts of two, completely crossing two). It’s a two-day drive each way, which is kind of draining, but for Thanksgiving travel it’s probably less draining than flying would be, since I’d have to either change planes multiple times or spend a lot of time driving at each end of the trip. Travel is one thing that was made worse by my move, since I went from living a two-hour drive from my parents’ house and 15 minutes from a major airport to living a two-day drive from my parents and living near a small regional airport that currently only offers flights to one city (they’re adding a city next year). Since my parents also live near a small regional airport or else a long drive from a major airport, that complicates travel. So, I drive.

It’s actually mostly a pleasant drive. There’s some beautiful scenery. It gives me a lot of time to think. I brainstormed a book while I drove and came up with some good ideas. I sang along with my driving playlist and got in some good vocal exercise. The tricky part is planning the trip. Since it’s two days and driving all day, it can be challenging to find a good time to travel. I had to head out a day earlier than I planned because there were storms forecast, and that meant I had to rush my preparations. It was a good thing I did it, though, because I’d have been driving through heavy thunderstorms a whole day if I’d stuck to my schedule. Then on the return trip, I had to fit my travel in between a big storm front that brought heavy rain and a front with freezing rain. The heavy rain/thunderstorms were a day ahead of me as I traveled and the freezing rain was a day behind me, but I had perfect travel weather. I just had to deal with some nasty traffic because I was driving on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

For that, I thought my navigation system had lost its mind. I left early in the morning and was making good time when suddenly it moved my estimated arrival time to half an hour later. Then a little later it moved it 15 minutes later than that, with nothing changing about my driving. There was a small traffic slowdown from a wreck, and I thought it might have been accounting for that, but it added 10 more minutes (it also told me the wreck was 900 feet ahead right after I passed it, so I was losing faith in my nav system). I got to where I was 50 miles from my destination and it told me I’d be there in two hours, so I thought it was nuts.

Then I saw the brake lights ahead. There was apparently a wreck, according to the highway signs, but it must have been cleared by the time I got there. We started moving again, and there were signs for another wreck, and there was another slowdown but no signs of the wreck. Then another slowdown with no explanation. Because they’d cleared the wrecks by the time I got there, the slowdown must not have been as bad as the travel time had originally estimated because the arrival time flipped back by half an hour and I was only about 40 minutes later than the initial estimated arrival time.

Still, that was better than the freezing rain I’d have had if I’d waited a day. We got snow and ice overnight after I got home. They even cancelled schools on Tuesday, though it did warm up, so it would have been clear by the time I got here.

It’s good to be home. Now I need to do the house cleaning I was planning to do in my initial travel prep schedule. I like to have everything ready a day early then spend the last day tidying everything that got messed up while I was packing and then have time to relax before travel. The cleaning and relaxing didn’t get done when I changed plans.

Since it was icy and I was tired, I did that relaxing yesterday on my first full day home. Now to tackle the cleaning so I’ll be ready to put up my Christmas decorations. It’s my first Christmas in my new house, so I’ll have to figure out where to put everything. The house is really tiny and full of furniture (and books), so there isn’t much space for a tree. I bought an artificial tabletop tree, and I have the garland I used to put on my loft railing and stairs that I’ll have to position. I don’t have as much stair railing, so maybe some can go on the old chimney in the kitchen or on the bookcases in the living room and office.