You’d have to be a cottonheaded ninnymuggin to not know the Christmas season brings with it plenty of holiday-themed movies.
And around our house, it’s “Elf.” Over and over.
Nearly every day since Thanksgiving, my wife pushed play on her favorite Will Ferrell movie. She skipped it once last week, which led to a rotten day the following day. She’s assured me she won’t miss another day between now and Dec. 25.
We could probably repeat every line in that movie, including the undervalued one from a nun early in the movie, “But the children love the books!” We’ve seen it enough to know if you skip 16 minutes into the movie (which my wife prefers), she can jump right to her favorite part, when Buddy starts his journey to New York City.
It’s hardly the only Christmas movie we’ve watched over the past month. We’ve seen everything from 1947’s “Miracle on 34th Street” in black and white to 1994’s “The Santa Clause” with Tim Allen to this year’s strange musical “Spirited,” which to me is clearly not Ferrell’s best Christmas movie.
We’ve seen enough of 1983’s “A Christmas Story” to know you could shoot your eye out. If 1969’s “Frosty the Snowman” taught us anything, it’s that when the first snow is also a Christmas snow, something wonderful is bound to happen. And we learned from 1989’s “Christmas Vacation” that nobody’s walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas.
I’ll be the first to admit Christmas movies can be a bit simplistic. There’s something about their pureness, though. There’s usually a morality twist that’s easy to enjoy. There’s something that shows the possible goodness in people that’s hard to resist.
Yes, we’ve watched an awful lot of Christmas movies, and we each have our favorite.
One of my daughters loves “A Christmas Story.” I don’t know if she’s nostalgic for the 1940s neither of us lived through or if she just really wants a Red Ryder Range 200 Shot BB gun.
Another daughter really seems strangely obsessed with 2018’s “The Princess Switch,” where a baker and a princess who look strikingly similar — perhaps because they’re both played by Vanessa Hudgens — switch roles.
One of my nieces and her daughter share a fascination with 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which is a little too dark for me to enjoy this time of year.
As it turns out, plenty of organizations have spent time pondering what the most popular Christmas movie is. Scholaroo.com and BetOhio.com both report the most popular Christmas movie in Ohio is “Home Alone,” followed by “The Grinch.”
The Lima Public Library’s highly scientific study — where 79 people put a vote into a matching bucket last week — more closely matched my wife’s preference for “Elf,” with 42% of patrons supporting that comedy. It was followed by “Home Alone” (19%), “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (15%), “The Polar Express” (15%) and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (9%).
As for me, I’ll stick with a classic, “Miracle on 34th Street.” I was happy to stream the black-and-white classic last week on Disney+, but I see it’s also scheduled to air on AMC twice on Friday (1 a.m. and 1:45 p.m.) and once on Christmas Day (7:15 a.m.).
It fascinates me to see Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle share the same criticism of Christmas 75 years ago that I have today, about the overcommercialization of the celebration of our Lord and Savior’s birth.
“That’s what I’ve been fighting against for years, the way they commercialize Christmas,” Kringle says to his teenaged friend, Alfred, after being asked to push certain toys as Macy’s Santa Claus.
Alfred agreed, saying, “A lot of bad ‘isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck. Make a buck.”
It’s just as true today as it was then, and it’s worth fighting back against it.
That’s the kind of message I don’t mind watching year after year.
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David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
