Actors and recording artists can count on two things to bring in sales: Christmas movies and Christmas albums. They may not care much for Jesus or the prophets, but they sure do love those reliable profits.
The made-for-TV Christmas movie has become a particular staple over the years. It began with animated stories for children starring Rudolph, Frosty, Charlie Brown, and the Grinch, and soon graduated to romantic romps for grownups, usually targeted at women who want nothing so much as a boyfriend for the holidays.
In 2008, Hallmark introduced its “Countdown to Christmas” series of holiday movies designed to warm your heart and tease a trickle down your cheek. The characters are always beautiful, busy, and troubled by something. By the end of the film they’ve fixed the problem, fallen in love, and discovered something new about themselves—usually that they’ve been working too hard. Hallmark must be doing something right, because the Christmas Countdown season now straddles two full months, with 41 new Christmas movies introduced this year and a whopping 165 in its film library.
I haven’t watched a single one all the way through.
I’m just not interested in superficially sentimental drivel. I want to scream when I hear Mariah croon, “All I want for Christmas is you.” I couldn’t care less that George Michael’s heart recipient “gave it away the very next day” and now he’s looking for “someone special.” When did Christmas become the ultimate dating mixer?
A quick perusal of Netflix provides similar inanity. The streaming service is offering 150 holiday films this year, and most of them are about romance, with titles such as The Holidate, 12 Dates of Christmas, Christmas with a View, LoveHard, and Christmas Wedding Planner. Many plots are clearly influenced by Christmas classics; for example, “Christmas Inheritance” copies several scenes from Christmas in Connecticut (a delightful Barbara Stanwyck vehicle from 1945), while The Claus Family borrows its main premise from Tim Allen’s perennial favorite The Santa Clause. Vanessa Hudgens’s Princess Switch trilogy (2018-21) is a knock-off of Dickens’s Prince and the Pauper (1937), run amok, with Hudgens playing not two but three lookalikes switching places and accents. Hudgens has a field day kissing all three of the love interests in various scenes.
Switch also brazenly mirrors the more recent A Christmas Prince (2017-19) trilogy, which preceded it by one year; in both film series, an ordinary girl meets a handsome prince in a small middle European kingdom; the besotted prince proposes on their first Christmas, they marry on the following Christmas in part 2, and baby arrives on the third Christmas, in movie 3. (I suppose we can expect Hudgens’ characters to follow suit with a baby or two in 2022—I hope they don’t mix up the fathers during conception!) My granddaughters love these movies, and they’re actually kind of cute when seen through their pre-teen eyes, while snuggling with them on the couch –if you can suspend all disbelief about royalty driving their own cars, decking their own halls, and making their own hot chocolate.
Royalty is a major theme in this year’s Netflix Christmas listings, with the two aforementioned princess movies, plus A Cinderella Story set in modern-day Manhattan, Christmas with a Prince, A Castle for Christmas, and the time-travel flick The Knight before Christmas, to name a few. Vanessa Hudgens also stars in Knight – I guess she found her niche in the rags-to-riches princess role. It makes me wonder if we aren’t all searching for a happily-ever-after ending to the nightmare of covid, where most homes are definitely NOT a castle, especially after nearly two years of being cooped up in them.
Netflix also offers a number of nostalgic settings populated by impossibly good-looking twenty-something characters with impossibly successfully careers as writers, photographers, artists, or bloggers. The films often sport a mysterious older character who may or may not be Santa in disguise, à la Miracle on 34th Street. A California Christmas, Christmas in the Heartland, and A Very Country Christmas are cautionary tales reminding us that the country mouse is always better off than the city mouse — so quit dreaming of those princess wishes that aren’t coming true anyway.
Call me Scrooge, but I’m just not drawn to the contemporary theme of would-be princesses seeking romance for Christmas. I’m even less interested in movies about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional Santas. I want my Christmas movies to have some kind of emotional, spiritual, or psychological depth. Their plots should contain loss and restoration, despair and hope, epiphany and transformation, with the magic of comedy and wonder thrown in. Lacking those themes, modern Christmas movies are little more than romantic comedies set in December.
Happily, there are several satisfying options for those seeking a good Christmas movie, even on Netflix. Kurt Russell’s very fine The Christmas Chronicles (2018) is back (read my review), along with its less fine but still engaging sequel The Christmas Chronicles 2, with Russell’s real-life wife, Goldie Hawn, as Mrs. Claus.
I also recommend The Family Man (2000), in which Jack (Nicolas Cage), a wealthy, carefree, single bachelor, wakes up in the bed and the life he would have experienced if he had married his college sweetheart Kate (Tea Leoni), with all the financial woes and parental responsibilities that would have gone with it. He’s guided on this journey by a humble and mysterious helper, played effectively by Don Cheadle. In addition to being a movie about the tender joys of fatherhood, The Family Man shows that choices have far-reaching consequences, and that the country mouse often does, indeed, live a richer life than the city mouse. It’s one of Cage’s best films.
New this year on Netflix is A Boy Called Christmas, a luminous fairy tale in which writer and director Gil Kenan creates an origin myth reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In a frozen land where it is always winter and never Christmas, the king offers a reward to anyone who can bring the community a reason to hope. Nikolas (Henry Lawfull), a motherless boy, sets out on a quest to find his missing father. Along the way he encounters both treachery and friendship as he gradually gathers the accoutrements of his true calling: a red cap made by his mother, a reindeer, a map that takes him “under the moon” and past Lake Blitzen, a village of toy makers, and the magical power that comes from believing. He also discovers the pain of sacrifice and the tender truth that “grief is the price we pay for love—and it’s worth it, a million times over.” The movie reminds us of the need for hope, not just romance, in this increasingly hopeless world. As a dear friend said when his mother was dying of cancer last year, “Hope defined our standard of living.” And it was good.
A Boy Called Christmas is presented as a story within a story. Maggie Smith is a dark Poppinsesque character who appears on the scene one dark Christmas Eve to stay with three recently motherless children while their father is away. Smith gives the character a no-nonsense approach to grief while exhibiting kind sensitivity at the same time. She is wonderful in the role. The external story intrudes occasionally on the unfolding myth in wonderfully inventive ways, giving the film a luminous fairytale quality. As narrator, Smith brings a grim, no-nonsense approach to grief while exhibiting a gentle sensitivity at the same time. She is wonderful in the role.
Christmas is associated with epiphany, and the best Christmas movies provide a moment of revelation when the protagonist sees clearly for perhaps the first time. In The Christmas Chronicles, the young lead, Teddy, is angry and bitter because his father, a firefighter, has lost his life running into a burning house. On the steps of a church where a choir is singing his father’s favorite hymn, Teddy questions the meaning of sacrifice. “He had a wife and two kids,” he laments bitterly, “and he gave it all up to help some random strangers.” Eventually his bitterness is resolved, of course, and he learns the true gift of Christmas, which is redemption born of sacrifice.
That same theme drives the movie that the American Film Institute lists as its “most inspirational film of all time,” It’s a Wonderful Life (1947). In it, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) is a man with a dream—seeing the world, having adventures, escaping from small-town life and responsibilities. But circumstances keep getting in the way, and at the film’s end, through no fault of his own, he faces arrest. In despair, he plans to kill himself. But his guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), anticipating the moment, shows George what the world would have been like had he never been born. George discovers that his many sacrifices made all the difference in the lives of others. In his own quiet way he has been a hero and adventurer after all. His life mattered.
It’s a Wonderful Life is about as close to a perfect movie as you can get. Director Frank Capra and star Jimmy Stewart both said it was their favorite film. I teared up just now, remembering that perfect moment in the end when everyone whom George has helped through the years comes to his aid, and pure love abounds.
And yet… one of my daughters hates this movie. She hates that George sacrifices everything – college, travel, honeymoon, notoriety, a satisfying career, and even his good name—for the benefit of others and the detriment of his own desires. She thinks the film asks too much of him, and that, by praising this film, society asks too much of us. Her contrarian view contains more than a hint of Randian objectivism.
Liberty magazine publisher Stephen Cox had a similar reaction to his first viewing of the film. He recalls, “I will never forget my first crack at that movie, 40 years ago. I was staying with a friend who joyously noted that the movie was on TV that Saturday afternoon. During the first scenes I thought, ‘This is the most ridiculously retrograde thing I’ve ever seen! It glorifies someone who keeps giving up his life for the mindless losers who happen to live in his vicinity.’ But by the end of the film, not only my host but I was in tears.”
The story on which It’s a Wonderful Life is loosely based makes the same case for sacrifice, but in the opposite way. The kind and generous George Bailey is a foil for Ebenezer Scrooge, that parsimonious old humbug in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which has been filmed, staged, adapted, and parodied for nearly two centuries. Ebenezer is the opposite of George Bailey. He has sacrificed nothing for others—and yet, he learns, he has sacrificed everything in the process. Both are classic examples of a person redeemed and transformed through epiphany.
Both George Baily and Ebenezer Scrooge are vastly more of themselves at the end of their stories than they are at the beginning. Yet unlike George Bailey, Ebenezer Scrooge thinks only of himself. He makes no sacrifices for others, accepts no excuses, and offers no aid. Some might say he’s a perfect Randian. Nevertheless, Scrooge is unsettled and unhappy. Like George Bailey, Scrooge is guided by an angel to see a version of his future, and like George, he discovers the joy that comes from helping those in need and sharing in their lives.
Both become Christ figures in their respective stories, as they choose to rescue others by bearing their burdens. Interestingly, although the name “Ebenezer” has come to be a hiss and a byword, synonymous with meanness and parsimony, the word “ezer” actually means “benevolent savior.” It first appears in the Bible when God creates Eve as an “ezer kenegdo,” not just a “help meet” but a savior, equal yet opposite to Adam. The word “Ebenezer” means “stone of my support.” The name suggests that Scrooge is stone-hearted yet solid, and created all along to be a savior of his community, just as Jesus was sent, at Christmas, to be a savior of the world. Ebenezer’s name reveals that his creator (Dickens) knew his true character from the beginning, and analogously that God sees our character with perfect eyes. Thus A Christmas Carol is an homage to the original Christmas story, and not just a good story about being kind to others. It’s a story worth revisiting every year.
The best Christmas movies can trace their roots to A Christmas Carol. They ask us to examine our lives, reflect on our choices, and discover changes that can lead to happier futures. They often contain a mysterious angel character guiding the protagonist toward the correct path. They give us hope that we aren’t alone in the darkness, and that a mighty, wonderful, everlasting counselor — who may or may not be Santa — does indeed exist.
Jo Ann Skousen is the founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival and the entertainment editor of Liberty Magazine. She teaches English Literature and writing at Chapman University. To learn more about the definition “Ezer Kenegdo,” order her book Matriarchs of the Messiah at Skousenbooks.com
After a month of sheltering at home, many Americans are missing their communion with God, faith and congregation, especially in the month where Passover, Easter, and Ramadan are observed. Is there a way to regain that sense of communion without going to church, temple, or mosque? Of course there is.
Dickinson was a well-read second-generation transcendentalist who was heavily influenced by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Michael Meyer says in The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, “Like Henry David Thoreau, she simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense she redefined the meaning of deprivation because being denied something—whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire—provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted.” For examples of Dickinson’s “deprivation” poetry, you might want to read “Water is Taught by Thirst,” “Success is Counted Sweetest” and “Heaven—Is What I Cannot Reach!”
The “tree whisperer,” Peter Wohlleben, says in The Hidden Life of Trees, that trees are biologically drawn to one another so that their branches often intertwine at the top, creating a domelike shape. Dickinson’s speaker recognizes this shape in the vault of the orchard and transforms it into her church. In the second stanza she plays with the homophones “surplice” (a robe worn by a minister) and “surplus” (more than enough) to suggest that we have more than enough ministers to go around. She chooses instead to wear her “wings,” a clear allusion to angels and the divinity bestowed upon her by God himself. She needs no bell clanging in the distance to call her to worship when the sunlight and cheerful sound of birds draws her naturally outside.
The rising sun has long been a symbol of faith and hope, reaching back to pagan times when it was worshiped as a god. The sun brought light, warmth, nourishment, and most of all, reassurance that life would continue. “I know this as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow” is a familiar declaration of confidence.
I learned from that experience the importance of preparation. We experienced many wonderful sunrise services as a family after that, but not in formal services. Instead, during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, I would read the story in the four Gospels and contemplate the events of the Savior’s final earthly days. I set my alarm for 20 minutes before sunrise on Easter morning and then, donning our robes and slippers, Mark and I would gently wake our children, wrap each of them in a comforter—a symbol of the Savior’s spirit, incidentally—and guide them quietly through the dark house out the back door and down the slope to the lake behind our house. We helped them into our boat and motored quietly to the center of the lake, where we listened to soft sacred music and nibbled on strawberries while we waited for the sun to rise. Birds chirped their wake-up songs, and occasionally a fish would splash out o the water. It was peaceful, cozy, and deeply spiritual.
“How to Survive Thanksgiving!” The headlines are fairly blaring with post-election advice on how to get along with family members this holiday season. “Be prepared to walk out!” they advise, as though protest is the greater part of valor. They seem to think we have nothing to talk about except politics, and nothing in common at that.
We see an example of this in the story of Eliezer and Rebekah in Genesis 24. Eliezer, Abraham’s chief servant, had been sent to Haran to find a bride for Abraham’s son Isaac. A gentile from Damascus, Eliezer was not of Abraham’s faith. Nevertheless, he prayed to the God of Abraham for guidance, and his prayer was answered in a miraculous way, leading him to find Rebekah at the well in exactly the manner Eliezer had described in his prayer. Overjoyed, Rebekah brought Eliezer to meet her brother Laban, who, seeing that Eliezer was tired and dusty from his journey of 400 miles, set food before the traveler.
We break much more than bread on Thanksgiving (although those soft yummy pillows of yeast and flour play a big role in the feast). Sharing food helps us break down barriers, open hearts, lubricate stories, heal wounds, and seal relationships. The best way to “survive” Thanksgiving during these turbulent times? Show a little more kindness, a little more grace, a little more love toward those around the table. And yes, maybe avoid a few topics–or better yet, find some common ground in them.
Jo Ann Skousen teaches English literature at Chapman University.
Later that day we went wake surfing, and Todd entertained us with his tricks. Then he brought out his old skurf board, the one with three fins for additional stability and easier control that he had used when he was learning. That one was for us. And it worked! I popped right up, found the sweet spot, and surfed behind the boat, with Todd and Mark shouting their approval and helping me improve. It was so much fun! Mark did great too, and Todd bragged to everyone about how well his dad had recovered when he started to fall behind the wave and fought to get back in front of it.
Jo Ann Skousen teaches English literature at Chapman University in California and Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. She is the entertainment editor for Liberty Magazine and the founding director of the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival. Her book Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ is available at matriarchsofthemessiah.com.
These photos of our children, taken twenty years apart in the backyard of our home in Florida, made me think of the flat where our family used to live. It was tiny even by Tiny House standards. The smaller of the two bedrooms was a narrow 6’ x 12’—more like a storage closet than a bedroom. Two children slept there, two on the couch in the living room, and the youngest on a pallet in the hallway. The small galley kitchen could hold two people at a time—three if one of them was the baby on my hip. The floorboards creaked when we walked, and the grinding of the building’s elevator, right next to the “master” bedroom, woke us up all night long. We had no washing machine, so each week I would carry piles of dirty clothes to the laundromat two blocks away. Each summer as we entered the front door with five children, seven suitcases, an umbroller and a diaper bag, I wondered how in the world we would manage to fit into this tiny space for three months.
The flat was located in St. Johns Wood London, just three blocks from the underground station, one block from Panzer’s and Europa grocery stores, one block in the other direction from Regents park, and 15 minutes to Piccadilly Circus and the theater district. It was where we spent some of our happiest summers. The children were the perfect ages for spending all their time with family. I can see them now, climbing through the big bay windows to reach the alley in the back where they would play tennis without a net, soccer without a goal post, or imagination games with their own dungeons, dragons, and little ponies. Two spinster sisters who lived upstairs would sit in their window watching them play, enjoying an afternoon’s entertainment with their tea and biscuits. We didn’t have a television, so we played board games, assembled jigsaw puzzles, and read stacks of books. My oldest discovered a sunny alcove at the end of the shared hallway where she would read Tin Tin, Asterix, and the Famous Five series of adolescent mysteries and imagine herself one of the Boxcar children.
We also didn’t have a car, so we traveled everywhere by underground, train, or big black taxis. We took day trips from London using a book I had discovered called, voila!, Day Trips from London. Its attention to detail predated Rick Steves’s travel books and provided us with magical days to Miss Havisham’s home in Rochester, Robin Hood’s tree in Nottingham, Henry VIII’s maze at Hampton Court, and home before bedtime. The pound was cheap back then, and so were the theater tickets. We went to West End plays as many as eight times a week, eating thick toast with apricot jam or berry tarts with clotted cream when we arrived home.
And it was safe. I could send the older two off to explore on their own with just their underground passes and each other. One night everyone wanted a taste of home from McDonald’s, but it was late and Mark and I didn’t want to go out. Not to worry! Tim and Valerie, aged 10 and 11, took everyone’s order and set off to Swiss Cottage, one stop away on the tube. At 10:00 at night! What was I thinking?? They were the original free-range children. Living in London had lasting effects on all of us. It instilled a lifelong love of the arts, history, books, travel, and fruit tarts. It taught us to love doing things rather than buying things. And it made us close as family.
So why did we sell it? Life intervened. Children grew. We purchased a house on a lake where boating and swimming sang their tantalizing siren songs every summer. Children grew even more, starting homes of their own. We began renting the flat to friends and then one friend wanted to buy it, promising with a forked tongue to let us use it whenever we wanted.
Jo Ann Skousen is the author of Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ. Autographed copies are available at http://www.matriarchsofthemessiah.com/buy-the-book/ She teaches English literature at Chapman University and Sing Sing Correctional Facility and runs the Anthem Libertarian Film Festival.
When our children were young and still living at home, I would set my alarm for 20 minutes before sunrise on Easter morning. My husband and I would gently wake our children, wrap each of them in a comforter, and guide them through the dark house out the back door and down the slope to the lake behind our house. Then we would help them into the boat and motor quietly to the center of the lake, where we would wait for the sun to rise. We listened to soft music about the Savior and nibbled on strawberries while we waited for the sun. Birds would chirp their wake-up songs, and occasionally a fish would splash out o the water.
In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.
John often spoke of himself in the third person as “the other disciple” or “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Jesus seems to have had a gift for making each person feel like His favorite–perhaps because, in his infinite love, we are indeed each his favorite. John felt that love deeply. Peter and John raced to the tomb to see what had happened, and John tells us that he got there first. But he was not first to enter the tomb. That privilege went to Peter, the chief apostle.
Mary’s grief was palpable. She still hadn’t quite realized the full implications of the angel’s earlier words: “He is not here! He is risen!” I remember feeling those words with a thrill of recogntion as I stooped into the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, lying near the foot of the hill of Golgotha, just insde the old city walls. “He is not here! He is risen!” What a glorious realization that is.
Earlier that week, when Jesus had been dining at the home of a Pharisee named Simon, Mary had crept quietly into the house to bathe the feet of the Savior with her tears, dry them with her hair, and anoint them with a precious ointment. These same feet would be torn and bloodied by the nails of the executioners in a few short days. When his host questioned why he would let a sinful woman touch him, Jesus gently corrected him with these words:
To learn more about Mary Magdalene, read Matriarchs of the Messiah: Valiant Women in the Lineage of Jesus Christ, by Jo Ann Skousen. Available at Amazon.com, or for an autographed copy go to http://www.matriarchsofthemessiah.com/buy-the-book/
We usually begin our remembrance of the Easter story with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem the week before His resurrection. This great day has become known as Palm Sunday, because of the palm fronds His devoted followers strewed along the road in front of Him.
When Jesus reached the home of Mary and Martha in Bethany, Lazarus had been dead four days. Mourners filled the home, comforting the women. Jesus remained in the shadows of the garden and sent for Martha, the sister who had concerned herself more with domestic duties during His earlier visits to their home. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” she wailed in accusatory grief when she saw Him. The fact that she greeted Him with an anguished complaint indicates just how close they were.
This simple yet powerful testimony echoes the words of Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration: “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God,” (Matthew 16:16) he had proclaimed. Jesus had responded to Peter’s testimony by explaining, “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” In that shadowed garden, Martha received that same testimony of the Savior’s divine mission.
Moments later, when Martha’s sister Mary also heard that Jesus was waiting in the garden, “she rose up hastily, and went out…[and] fell down at His feet, saying unto Him, ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” This time Jesus did not ask His weeping friend to declare her witness. Apparently Mary had already experienced the testimony borne by the spirit of truth. Instead, he comforted her.
As God was organizing the earth, he paused at the end of each creative period to admire his work and say, “It is good.” The earth was beautiful and glorious, fit for a king–and a queen. God had created light, water, mountains, valleys, plants, fish, birds and animals. He had created Adam and given him dominion over all the earth. But as God admired His final creation–Adam–He remarked, “It is not good.” Something was missing. That “something” was Eve.
What a powerful definition of Woman at the very moment of her creation! She is a benefactor, a rescuer and a savior. In fact, the authors of Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender contend that the word “ezer should be translated as ‘power’ and [coupled with the adjective kenegdo] the verse should read: ‘a power equal to him” (Kristen E. Kvam 1999, 28). Other characteristics associated with ezer kenegdo include royalty, achievement, pioneering and risk taking (Terrien 11). In sum, Eve was created to be a partner with Adam and a powerful influence on her posterity.
Every Monday and Wednesday I drive up the river from my home just north of Manhattan to Ossining, where I park my car in an upper lot and hike down 114 uneven stone steps (yes, I’ve counted them) to Sing Sing, the notorious maximum security prison where I teach college and pre-college courses to the inmates. I check in at noon for my 1:00-3:00 class, hike back up to the lot for my two-hour break at 3:30, and then return at 5:30 for my 6:30 -8:30 class. Working with these students is a labor of love and the best part of my week.