I know I'm as early as a Wal-Mart, but I want to be among the first to check in with my obvious picks for The Two Greatest Christmas Movies: It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Christmas Story (1983).
Let me quickly add Honorable Mentions: Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) — really more of a Halloween movie, though — and the Chuck Jones version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Fine work all, but my two picks are the gems in the crown that shine more deeply, and tell us more about American Christmas and the thin red (and green?) line of the Season itself, than any others.
Any heft these movies possess comes from a dual source: (1) the brains of their creators--Jean Shepherd (and OK, the director, Bob Clark, who does get many things right) and Frank Capra--and (2) the faces of their protagonists--Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) and George Bailey (James Stewart).
In the Shepard/Clark movie, Christmas is bracketed and bookended by a variety of mishaps, malfeasances, and garden-variety meannesses. In fact, Christmas itself is forgotten for relatively lengthy stretches, as Flick's tongue gets glued to a flag pole — and it hurts to watch, doesn't it? — and Scut Farkus dishes it out (and takes it), and Randy roots among the cabbages, and a Major Award gets its fifteen minutes of fame, and lug nuts fly like sparks in the night air, while profanities bark and all of one's hard work results in a decoded "crummy commercial."
Despite these diversions, what places this movie on the list is its willingness to dip into Shepard's canon and fill out these mock-epic lives, to make us feel they deserve a perfect Christmas morning, with its granting of the wish for once --including of course an eye getting (more or less) shot out --as well as that amazing sequence that moves from innocent delight at a decapitated duck to a still and glowing and perfectly natural moment before the tree.
All of it becomes more than whimsy and farce--which good Christmas movies are wont to serve up--and more than heartstrings tugged, but an implanted memory, like all lasting family stories, retold so often the tale becomes the truth; and fiction, you need to know, is truer than fact.
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