Watching Christmas movies with your kids is a sure-fire way to get everyone’s tinsel in a twist as December 25th looms. You’re keen to ease into a lukewarm bath of nostalgia, they want to swipe your phone and search for cheat codes for Roblox and Genshin Impact.
Of course, even when you persuade/guilt-trip everyone into sitting down together, there is every chance that you – an old person who doesn’t sleep enough – will immediately find yourself struggling to say awaaaake ... Sorry, just nodded off there. Then there’s the tooth-and-claw issue of couch privilege. Who gets the comfy bit on the outside? And who will end up wedged in the middle – sinking slowly down, lost to the quicksand like the disposable third lead in an 1980s action film?
Next comes the choice of movies. It has to be something from the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire point is to impress upon your children the weird idea of cinema being a thing in the dark days before Five Nights at Freddy’s and Wicked. But – oh my – some of those beloved talkies of yesteryear have not aged well. Many were far darker than you imagine. Others were filled with innuendoes that had soared over your head as a clueless 12-year-old in 1985 – but which will earn an immediate red card from today’s savvier children.
Obviously, there is widespread disagreement as to what qualifies as a Christmas movie. For instance, 1971 Roald Dahl adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory contains not a single reference to the season of goodwill, but is as essential a component of the 1970s Irish Christmas as your mother chain smoking while stuffing the turkey or your dad nipping out for a quick pint and not resurfacing for the next 48 hours.
Fostering at Christmas: ‘We once had two boys, age 9 and 11, who had never had a Christmas tree’
Fintan O’Toole: ‘My grandad is dead. I am going to tennis today’: Christmas letters to my son, 1997
After the fall of Assad, a family reunites
Christmas TV and movie guide: the best shows and films to watch
Where, then, to start? What about The Muppet Christmas Carol from 1992? It is one of the best-ever screen adaptations of Dickens, with much of the dialogue coming straight from the source text. It also features a great late-career turn from Michael Caine as old Ebenezer himself. Plus, it has a tear-jerker back story, with director Brian Henson having conceived of the project as a tribute to his late father, Muppets creator Jim Henson, who died in 1990 at age 53. On the subject of animated delights, you also owe it to your kids to introduce them to Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, which brings a spooky midwinter chill to the season of goodwill (though it is already beloved by Gen Z, so maybe they are introducing it to you).
In an altogether different vein, there is 1988′s Die Hard, the source of a decades-long debate over whether it is a “Christmas movie” or a “movie set at Christmas”. To which the only sensible is answer is, “Yippee Ki Yay ... who cares?”. It has Bruce Willis as the original blue-collar action hero, crawling around a semi-completed tower block (honestly, they could have set it in Sandyford anytime in the past 15 years) before shoving Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber out the window – an evil elf falling very violently off his shelf.
But what about those films that, as mentioned above, have not aged so well? Consider Christmas staple Raiders of the Lost Ark, which cheerfully asks you to buy into the on-off romance between Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood – notwithstanding a 12-year age gap.
Twelve years! Big deal, you’re thinking. That’s until you realise Indy was supposedly 27 when he and Marion first got together, and she was 15 or 16. Far from swashbuckling his way across the world, pinching indigenous artefacts for his fancy-pants Ivy League university, Indy should be on an offenders’ register.
Sex-pest vibes similar emanate from Tom Cruise in the original Top Gun, where he follows Kelly McGillis into the loo after she expresses her lack of interest in him. What a scamp/predator.
Of all the badly-aged Christmas classics, none is more egregious than Love Actually, which is only 21 years old, yet has the moral values of a bawdy Edwardian opera. Here, the key scene is the one involving Andrew Lincoln’s Mark. Recall how he turns up on Keira Knightley’s doorstep and, upon confirming that her character Juliet’s husband/his best friend (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is out of sight, declares his undying love via the series of oversized cards. Call the cops! No, seriously – dial 999 immediately. The only Christmas gift this guy deserves is an ankle tag.
“Quite creepy,” is how Knightley remembered the sequence in a recent interview. She isn’t wrong. It is a reminder that, if all Christmas movies show their age eventually, some bear up to the passage of time better than others.
So forget predatory Indiana Jones and valentine-to-stalking Love Actually and slap on the Muppet Christmas Carol – a one-way ticket to puppet paradise that warms the cockles and, if only for a few hours, will bring the happy ghosts of your childhood Christmas into the present day.
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date