With today being a massive travel day, DBB will take a brief two-day movie sabbatical and return Friday with the game preview and prediction for Bears at Jets. (There’s no preview to write before we have an injury status update.)
I don’t think what follows required much of a preamble. If you like Christmas movies, here is a guide to watching one every single day until Christmas, with a few Thanksgiving affairs to kickstart the series. A few notes:
- I do not like “The Grinch” story in almost any of its forms.
- I tried to make the list a nice mix of modern and classic, but that meant cutting a film like Christmas in Connecticut (Peter Godfrey, 1945) in favor of some of the younger options.
- I find Charlie Brown, generally, to be a sourpuss bore.
- I wanted to include Best Little Whorehouse in Texas because it includes my favorite Christmas song, “Hard Candy Christmas.” But the movie is terrible and has nothing to do with Christmas. So just go listen to that song.
November 23rd: Planes, Trains and Automobiles (John Hughes, 1987)
November 24th (Thanksgiving): Mouse on the Mayflower (Rankin & Bass, 1968)
- A holiday tradition established by Reverend Dave and me over the past several years. Sure, it’s about a mouse taking the Mayflower to the new world. But it’s also so much worse than that.
November 25th: Home for the Holidays (Jodie Foster, 1995)
November 26th: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (Jeremiah Chechik, 1989)
- The perfect transitional film between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
November 27th: The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson, 1992)
- Try to find the original version, including the song When Love is Gone.
November 28th: Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990)
November 29th: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (Chris Columbus, 1992)
- Not only an insane Christmas movie; one of the most insane movies ever made.
November 30th: White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954), Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
- This is a double feature of what I call “Christmas-adjacent films.” They are both put over the top by their music. (If you don’t understand what I mean by that, pay close attention to the Die Hard score next time you watch the film.)
November 31st: It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
- It is a lesser Christmas movie and a lesser Capra offering, but it has achieved untouchable status with a certain generation, so it is the only film I begrudgingly included on this list.
December 1st: A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2011)
