We all act funny when we go home for Christmas, go to bed weary from travel and wake up in our childhood beds. Nowhere is strange holiday behavior more apparent than in our choice of entertainment. Suddenly, stripped from jobs and friends, we find ourselves sitting in front of the TV, watching A Christmas Story 10 times in a row before sinking into It’s A Wonderful Life. It gets weirder from there.
Sometimes it’s good on Christmas to watch movies that are not Christmas movies, per se, but happen to be set on Christmas—say, Die Hard 2, Home Alone 2, The Royal Tenanbaums, where Christmas is not the topic itself but serves to augment whatever emotion, whether it’s Bruce Willis wishing he wasn’t getting all beat up, Macaulay Culkin wishing his parents hadn’t abandoned him in New York, or a family (almost) wishing it could function normally.
The only Christmas movie that my family was ever able to agree on was Terminator 2. It has nothing to do with Christmas, and Schwarzenegger makes for a pretty weak Santy Claus. But watching a robot-man toss a roadhouse hood onto a kitchen burner while George Thorogood’s "Bad to the Bone" blasts over the surround sound puts me in the holiday mood in the same way that, say, the scent of chestnuts roasting on an open fire does for others.
It’s no Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas, but hey. For me it’s home.
What will you watch this holiday weekend?
Gone Christmasin’