As the winter wind howls and exam season looms, it’s time for me to reflect on some of my favourite and most nostalgic holiday movies.
The Nativity Story
Picture this — you have just turned four years old. It’s nearly Christmas break, and you’re just wrapping up your fourth month of junior kindergarten. At school, it’s a red-and-green day and you bounce from classroom to classroom making nativity scenes out of popsicle sticks and winning strangely religious games of bingo. Soon, you find yourself in the library, the lights dimmed and a movie playing. The movie? The Nativity Story, featuring relative unknown Oscar Isaac.
You’ve missed the first half — these stations are only 30 minutes long after all — but you wander in around the time that King Herod decrees all boys under the age of two should be slaughtered. Then, the movie proceeds to show in graphic detail exactly how this act was conducted. As you squint your eyes shut in horror, your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex decide that this is the perfect moment to finalize their development of the set of mature neuro-structures associated with the formation of autobiographical memories. While you sit flabbergasted that that the librarian has yet to realize that this movie is not appropriate for children, your brain is filing away its first ever memory!
When I said that these Christmas movies made me nostalgic, I wasn’t kidding.
Although 17 years later, I have yet to see Catherine Hardwicke’s 2006 The Nativity Story in full, I would be remiss not to include it on this list. I mean, what’s more nostalgic than a person’s first memory? While I wouldn’t recommend showing it to any child under the age of eight for the fear of traumatizing them for life, I still find it to be an interesting, more nuanced take on the classic Christian origin story (from what I was unlucky enough to see).
The Polar Express
While nonetheless horrifying for children under the age of five (don’t even get me started on Santa’s elves), The Polar Express is likely much closer to what you expected to see on this list. My family and I have watched this film every Christmas Eve for as long as I can remember, and while it was a heck of a lot more exciting when I believed in Santa Claus, I’m still not quite ready to give the tradition up.
The Polar Express truly manages to bring together all the best bits of the Christmas movie genre. Its heartwarming story and heavy emphasis on the power of belief and wonder is beautiful and an incredibly necessary message to convey to children during the holidays. Even as an adult, the showstopping soundtrack makes it literally impossible to not shed a tear. The animation was truly ahead of its time and Tom Hank’s performance is still wildly impressive to this day.
Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas
While there is a good probability that only a niche audience will relate to my undying love for this holiday film, it can’t be ignored. For a long time, I thought my memory of it was the result of some feverish dream, but I stumbled upon the illegally burned DVD my grandfather pirated for me in 2006 a few years ago and I’ve never looked back.
As you can tell, I seem to have been somewhat traumatized by Christmas movies up until this point, and usually any take on The Christmas Carol would end with the same result. Yet Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas somehow finds the perfect balance between absolute nightmare fuel and the most ridiculous cartoon you have ever seen in your life. The movie’s humor is versatile, the animation is impressive for its 2006 release date, but most importantly, it is truly the campiest thing I have ever witnessed.
The incredible violence endured by Daffy Duck playing the role of Scrooge, who spends the entire film being battered, bruised and crushed into a concerningly thin pancake on multiple occasions is somehow comically genius. Almost better are the ridiculous antics of side characters like Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny, who end up in comically absurd situations. It’s so stupid, yet so entertaining.
You’ve Got Mail
I’ve got to start by saying that You’ve Got Mail isn’t a Christmas movie. I’m aware of that, yet it feels so all encompassingly Christmas-coded that it has to be on this list. In fact, as I’ve gotten older and outgrown a lot of the movies I watched as a kid, You’ve Got Mail has remained and taken its place as my favourite movie to watch during the holidays.
Its warm colors and cozy vibes make it the perfect film to watch when it’s freezing cold outside. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are undoubtedly the best rom-com couple to ever grace the screen (see Sleepless in Seattle for further proof) and New York City will never again be as beautiful as it is in this film. Every year, I take my cold-weather fashion inspiration from Kathleen Kelly and one year, I got so into the film that “If Only” from the movie’s soundtrack was my number one song of the year. I cannot figure out how to express my undying love for this film in words, and even though I think it’s only Christmastime for about 15 minutes in the movie, You’ve Got Mail is the most nostalgic holiday movie of all time for me.