The Best Xmas Movies (Ever)

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. For family, for friends, for giving, for making gingerbread houses and drinking hot chocolate . . . and watching the corniest, funniest, most heart-warming and nostalgia-inducing movies around.

Here are my top picks:

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

How can you go wrong with Dr. Seuss? Everything rhymes so delightfully, The Whos, and all of Whoville, look so adorable and enchantingly bizarre, and even the Grinch–that Christmas sabotaging cave-dweller, with his heart two sizes too small–is strangely cute. Beyond that, it’s an important and intelligent story, which both the 6-year-old and 86-year-old can enjoy. It’s a classic. If you don’t know who the Grinch is, and how he stole Christmas, and then came to understand it . . . well then, I don’t even want to know you.

Home Alone, & Home Alone: Lost in New York

If you were a kid when either movie came out, you know what I’m talking about. Who could forget the movies where an 8-year-old kid takes on two idiot criminals. In the first movie, he defends himself entirely alone in his own home when his parents forget him on an xmas trip. Then, in the sequel, he faces the same two robbers again, solo, but this time in New York (due to  a mix up at the airport). I’m not really sure what these movies say about parenting, but watching a young Macaulay Culkin (as Kevin MCallister) outsmart the hell out of “The Wet Bandits, nee Sticky Bandits” (played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) is hilarious every time.

It’s a Wonderful Life

How could you let a Christmas go by  without hearing Jimmy Stewart say, “You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down .  . .” You couldn’t, so don’t. It’s a Wonderful Life is truly a wonderful movie, and I’m not just saying that because I’m transfixed by the way Jimmy Stewart talks. It’s probably one of the best movies of all time, and speaks a message that is both timeless and enlightening. George Bailey, in romantic black and white, learns the age old lesson of “you don’t know what you have ’till it’s gone,” and to let go of the “could of, would have, should haves” in this perfect Christmas flick.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Who doesn’t love Charlie Brown with his horrible luck (it still kills me that he got a bag full of rocks when he went trick-or-treating in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown)? And let’s not forget his “good griefs” and the most pathetic Christmas tree ever. There’s something so comforting about that round-headed little boy as he goes about understanding the meaning of the holiday season, along with the bullying Lucy, his faithful dog Snoopy (with that adorable laugh), the “barmp-barmp-barmp” whenever an adult speaks and the beautiful, instrumental music (my favourite? “O Christmas Tree”). There’s a reason why they’re still airing a holiday special from 1965 on TV every year. It’s xmas movie gold.

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