Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Over the past three months, I have watched 100 Christmas movies. I have, to quote Elf, passed “through the seven layers of candy-cane forest and the sea of swirly twirly gumdrops”, and emerged with a stiff neck and an eye twitch. I have racked up six days’ of viewing time. I have hounded the writers, producers and directors of Christmas movies, most of whom did not want to talk about films they made 30 years ago.Why did I put myself through this? Christmas movies are the most critically overlooked genre. The ritual of watching them is as central to the holiday as pulling crackers and carol singing. This year, thousands of families will sit down and rewatch their favourites. But, in the UK and US at least, those classics tend to comprise a narrow canon. I figured there was more to the genre. How did Christmas films come to be what they are today?Christmas movies are beloved and reviled, legendary and forgettable. But very few of them are considered genuinely good. Only one Christmas film appears regularly on lists of the best 100 films ever made: It’s A Wonderful Life, released in 1947. Still, they keep making them — more than 100 a year. 2024’s offerings include Netflix’s Hot Frosty, about a grieving widow who rebounds with a sexy snowman, and Amazon’s Red One, in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson rescues a kidnapped Santa Claus. From those descriptions, it might seem as though we’ve drifted a long way from the genre’s origins. But in fact they haven’t changed that much. If your first thought when asked to name the original Christmas film is something like Holiday Inn (1942) or Meet Me in St Louis (1944), you’re not close. The first Christmas movie came out in 1898, a year before Marie Curie discovered polonium. Santa Claus, directed by British magician-turned-filmmaker George Albert Smith, is a minute and a half long and shows a pair of children hanging up stockings by a fireplace. Santa then jumps down the chimney, carrying a Christmas tree, stuffs the presents in the stockings, and vanishes. The end.What we choose to watch at Christmas speaks to our individual taste on a base levelSanta Claus was a trailblazer in a couple of respects: it was the first example of a parallel action shot, with Santa appearing on the rooftop of the house in an illuminated corner of the screen while the children sleep in their beds. Bryony Dixon, silent film curator at the BFI, tells me that Smith was part of a crop of Victorian filmmakers who experimented with Christmas content. The following years saw Georges Méliès’s whimsical snowy montage A Christmas Dream (1900) and James Williamson’s sentimental tragedy The Little Match Seller (1902), among many others. These films were conceived as “commercial entertainment” from the get-go. They would have been exhibited at fairground attractions, and in theatrical booths of “up to 700 people”, mostly targeted at children. Given the Victorians’ reputation for piety, it might seem surprising that none of these films touches on religion. Mark Connelly, the editor of Christmas at the Movies and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, says this was partly because of censorship. By the late 19th century, films could be banned for being “offensive or blasphemous”, so filmmakers leant towards magical realism and paganistic imagery instead, to attract the broadest possible audiences. Far and away the most popular films of the silent period are adaptations of Clement Clarke Moore’s 1825 poem “Twas The Night Before Christmas”, and the works of Charles Dickens. Fifteen versions of A Christmas Carol were made before 1951. Dickens’s own relatives attended a private screening of a 1910 version produced by Thomas Edison’s company. How they thought it compared to 1901’s Scrooge, in which the Ghost of Christmas Present appears in a bedsheet, will forever remain a mystery. Over 100 versions of A Christmas Carol now exist, including the 80s and 90s interpretations Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol. There is a topsy-turvy quality to all Christmas films. As a genre, they tend to embody what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque”: social orders are flipped, eccentric characters given free rein. Many feature a negligent or absent parent (usually a dad) who learns to see things from a child’s perspective. The 1909 film A Trap For Santa Claus, directed by DW Griffith, is about two children who set out to trap Father Christmas after their own alcoholic father leaves home. It’s a lot like the 2018 movie The Christmas Chronicles in which a brother and sister, grieving for their dead dad, capture Santa (Kurt Russell) and tie him up with a string of lights. In both films Santa Claus becomes a stand-in for the missing parent. In Alfonse Frenguelli’s 1915 melodrama Christmas Eve, a child stops her recently sacked father from shooting his former boss, and in the process, persuades the boss to rehire him. This bonkers resolution is made possible only by the concept of “Christmas spirit”, anticipating dozens of future classics including Home Alone and Love Actually. Edison’s 1914 film Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus is about a burglar who steals presents wearing a Santa costume, and, like The Grinch (2000), is caught out by an amateur detective. Even the weirdest old films feel strangely familiar: The Insects’ Christmas, a 1913 animation in which resurrected dead insects hang out with a claymation Santa, reminded me of Tim Burton’s ghoulishly playful The Nightmare Before Christmas. By day 40 of my Christmas watchathon, reality had begun to slip away. It was Halloween and I was standing in a supermarket aisle humming “Jingle Bells”. For more than a month I’d been spending all my free time watching Christmas movies. At social events, I’d psychoanalyse the kid in The Snowman and try to engage my friends in discussions about “the meaning of yuletide joy”. Before my partner went to work, I’d promise him I wasn’t going to watch any more that day. When he returned I would be covertly wiping away tears after a quick screening of the pre-war classic Remember the Night on my phone in the bath. On October 31, it was clear I was headed for some kind of Christmas-induced breakdown. Remember the Night is a classic from the 1940s Golden Age — the era in which the genre really took off and when Hollywood began to pump money into different formats: witty romances like A Shop Around The Corner, westerns like John Ford’s Three Godfathers and, of course, musicals like Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, which features the best-selling single of all time, “White Christmas”. The crown jewels of this period are two 1947 dramas: Miracle on 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life. Both are reworkings of A Christmas Carol that culminate in their own Christmas miracles, struck through with tragedy: lonely children, financial turmoil, suicidal ideation and the apocalyptic prospect of Santa being institutionalised. It feels appropriate that the best festive films are underscored with sadness. The most wonderful time of the year is often defined by stress, family strife and financial struggle. Connelly describes how Christmas films help us not only reckon with seasonal depression, but “with the nature of contemporary social concerns, or the nature of contemporary culture”. In the post-war America of the late 1940s and 50s, alcoholism, psychological crises and dead husbands or fathers were a common theme. In the 1965 animated TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas, the comically dour Charlie struggles to find meaning in the holiday amid an existential loneliness: “I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards,” he says, “but I’m still not happy.” Today, we see an overwhelming number of lost loves, mean bosses, dead parents and burned-out workers (see 2003’s Love Actually, 2019’s Klaus, and 2024’s Our Little Secret for all four). A Wonderful Life was not an instant classic. It placed 26th in the list of highest-grossing films of 1947. It was only in the 1970s, when the film fell out of copyright and began being televised, that millions of Americans revised their opinions. Most Christmas films, it seems, need decades to percolate and form part of the cultural fabric. With his hearty laugh, shock of white facial hair and extensive toy collection, director Brian Levant isn’t a million miles away from Santa Claus. I speak to Levant on Zoom on a sunny October afternoon. Behind him hangs a poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Turbo-Man, the action-hero protagonist of Jingle All The Way, the 1996 movie he directed. He pans the camera to a metre-tall doll of Turbo-Man in the corner. “After the movie opened I didn’t even want to look at that toy,” he says. “It sat in a padded foam box in my garage for almost 20 years.” In Jingle All The Way, Schwarzenegger stars as a workaholic dad who tries to win back the affection of his son by buying him the sold-out toy Turbo-Man for Christmas. The story had all the ingredients of a hit: a big name, a madcap action premise and a $60mn budget. Yet it failed to meet expectations: despite a solid commercial performance, it attracted abysmal reviews and, later, legal battles. Levant describes it as “a dismal failure” and refused to make another Christmas movie for 30 years. “I turned down Elf!” he laughs. “Yeah, that was probably a mistake.” Over the years, Jingle snuck back into public consciousness. By the mid-2000s, it had become a cult classic and Levant began to be approached by young people who told him it was their favourite Christmas film ever. Gradually, Levant’s opinion of the film flipped and he rescued Turbo-Man from the garage. I ask him why the film resonates now. The critic Sarah Marshall has called it a “prescient comment on holiday consumerism” — does he agree? “I mean that’s what critics like to say, right?” he says. “I was just trying to create a world where the story could be credible.”At Christmas, critical opinions don’t tend to hold sway. Many films we now consider to be classics weren’t initially well-received. The Wiz (1978), a musical Wizard of Oz starring an all-black cast including Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, was controversially panned upon release. The 1984 slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night was banned in the UK for offending parents who objected to the notion of a killer Santa Claus — today it’s an edgelord favourite that Quentin Tarantino calls “the only holiday movie worth talking about”. Even 2000s classics like Love Actually and The Holiday were not warmly reviewed on release. Nancy Meyers, director of The Holiday, told me that she never really thought of it as a Christmas movie: “It has become one which delights me. But, as I was writing it and making it, it didn’t really occur to me.” Famously, Die Hard was released in July of 1988 and was never even intended to be watched in December. Christmas is a shame-free time, when eccentric choices are tolerated, celebrated even. In the streaming era, this includes swathes of campy Netflix and Hallmark releases, with their AI-adjacent scripts and bludgeoning social conservatism. What we choose to watch at Christmas speaks to our individual tastes. We can describe, for example, a film in which Bruce Willis shoots up terrorists as “Christmassy”, or say that Hot Frosty is an astute comment on the difficulties of modern dating. Because it’s Christmas, after all — and, to quote Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas is about “believing in things when common sense tells you not to”. By late November, the lights had gone up on Oxford Street and I felt dizzy and ill. As the credits rolled on my 100th Christmas film, Gremlins (1984), I couldn’t imagine ever watching another. But I also felt weirdly, anxiously gleeful, and found myself yearning for my next fix. Eventually I dug out some Halloween sweets from the cupboard, drew the curtains and fired up A Nightmare on Elm Street. Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
