Frontmezzjunkies reports: My Favourite Christmas Films
By Ross
Every December, I find myself returning to A Christmas Carol, not so much as a ritual to be checked off my list that I check twice, but as a story that insists on being engaged with again and again. I’ve written recently about seeing it staged most beautifully at the Campbell House Museum by Soup Can Theatre and Three Ships Collective, where the intimacy of the space gifted the story, stripping it down to its moral bones for our delight. I also wrote about revisiting the 1999 television adaptation starring Guy Pearce, which refuses warm comfort in favour of intense reckoning. But what continues to fascinate me is just how elastic Dickens’s fable remains. Whether performed live or filtered through a screen, the story bends toward the moment we’re living in, asking the same uncomfortable question with a different urgency each time: what are we doing with the lives we are allowed to change? It is not nostalgia that draws me back to it, but the quiet fear that we might stop listening.
That same impulse, the desire to be reminded rather than merely soothed, threads through many of my favourite Christmas films. It’s a Wonderful Life understands despair before it offers hope, while White Christmas lives in luscious harmony and movement, knowing that joy is something you build together as a found family of friends and companions, counting their blessings instead of sheep. The Sound of Music may not announce itself as a Christmas film in that traditional sense, yet its final act carries the unmistakable weight of faith, resistance, and chosen family. Even A Christmas Story, with its leg lamp absurdity and red rider gun childhood mischief, captures something deeply true about longing, disappointment, and the strange tenderness of memory and nostalgia. These films endure not only because they are seasonal, but because they understand that survival often arrives disguised as celebration.
Then there are the films I reach for when I want romance with a slightly more modern edge. Love Actually remains me-too messy and imperfect, but I return to it for its generosity of spirit and its belief that connection, however fleeting or flawed, is worth pursuing. The Holiday offers a gentler fantasy, one that understands the healing power of distance, reinvention, and unfamiliar beds. A theme I am more than willing to embrace, especially that English country cottage of hers. Both films are deeply aware of aloneness, particularly during a season that pretends it does not exist. They are aspirational without being cruel, sentimental without entirely lying to us, and optimistic in a world that seems to want to beat that out of us.
And still, I know that before the holidays are over, I will sit down once again with The Muppet Christmas Carol. It may be the most emotionally honest version of Dickens’s story precisely because it trusts sincerity and humour in equal measure. And it trusts Michael Caine to play Scrooge as if no one is watching, while the Muppets that surround him understand that community, chaos, and kindness are inseparable. It is a version that welcomes children without condescension and adults without cynicism. Like all the films I return to year after year, it reminds me that Christmas stories are not about perfection or purity, but about the possibility of choosing better while we still can. And perhaps that is why we keep watching them, not because they change, but because we do.
