The Night the Reindeer Died in OUTSIDELEFT

In the days before streaming the release date of the Christmas Radio Times was an important event. I would sit (like many across the country) with a marker pen, and a mince pie and read through each page in detail, circling the shows and movies I wanted to watch. You might have read that I love Christmas music, well I love Christmas movies too and again, if you don't like Christmas movies, you might be watching the wrong ones!

Every year there is an argument about what is and isn't a Christmas movie. It is as much a Christmas tradition as a cracker and a tree to argue this point on social media, in the pub and at work. Some suggest if a movie could take place at any time of year but just happens to be at Christmas, e.g. Die Hard, then it is not a 'Christmas movie', but that would also include Home Alone and Gremlins and these are two classics of the festive season. Some would argue that it should be a 'Family movie' and you shouldn't say ‘mother f&"ker’ in a Christmas movie, again this means ‘Die Hard’ is eliminated. Should we also remove horror movies such as ‘Black Christmas’ and the great ‘Rare Exports (A Christmas Tale)’. When I was a kid, every year one TV channel or another would show ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘The Guns of Navarone’ and ‘The Great Escape’, seemed Nazis were popular at Christmas in the 70s.

Shouldn’t ‘A Christmas Movie’ just be a movie we like watching at Christmas because it is a personal or family tradition? A film we are happy to watch every year, even if we know most of the lines by heart because it makes us feel Christmassy and gets us in the mood for the jollity ahead. My wife loves to watch the terrible Hallmark movies, in which every plot presents us with a variation of the same redemption plot, e.g. a female city entrepreneur travels back to her small hometown and meets her first love who is now a baker (or engages in some sort of craft) and thy fall in love. For me it has to be ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ which I have managed to watch most years since the late 1960s.

It is difficult to escape watching at least one version of arguably the most adapted work of English literature, the Dickens Classic, ‘A Christmas Carol’. It's a ghost story so suits the time of year well and it is about redemption, which is core to many Christmas movies including Die Hard. I watch many versions ‘A Christmas Carol’ over the Holidays, and I also like to read it and the other Dickens Christmas stories, ‘The Chimes,’ ‘The Cricket on the Hearth,’ ‘The Battle of Life,’ and ‘The Haunted Man.’ (if you are going to do Christmas, you should really immerse yourself in it).

My first choice of ‘A Christmas Carol’ screen adaptations must be ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’. I'm not a big fan of musicals, but I'm happy to hear the muppets sing and, in their version, Michael Caine puts in a stellar performance as Scrooge. The next best is probably the 1951 Alistair Sim version and then Bill Murray in ‘Scrooged’. I also have a soft spot for the 1971 ‘Animated Classic’ version produced by the legend Chuck Jones. But I know you’ll have your own favourites. In Bill Murray’s version, the movie begins with a spoof trailer for a Lee Majors TV special called ‘The Night the Reindeer Died’ which is an irreverent violent action movie. It isn’t until recently that this idea has been manifested as ‘Fat Man’ (starring Mel Gibson as Santa being perused by a hit man), John Woo’s revenge thriller from 2023 called ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Violent Night’ ( I do love a pun at Christmas) starring David Harbour as a drunken Santa who foils a home invasion heist. I suspect that the idea for ‘Violent Night’ came from a few people in the movie business having the annual ‘is Die Hard a Christmas movie’ argument, because it is basically a remake of Die Hard 1 and 2 with Santa instead of John Maclean.

Returning to themes of the supernatural. For some years I’ve had ‘The Family Man’ from the year 2000 on my Christmas watch list, which follows Nicolas Cage through a ‘sliding doors’ moment, when he is given the chance by an angel to see what his life would have turned out like if he had chosen to stay with his first love and become a suburban family man, rather than a single city trader surrounded by the luxuries of a large New York apartment and a Ferrari. The influence for this is obviously ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ which is heavily influenced by a 1943 short story called ‘The Greatest Gift’ by Phillip Van Doren Stern, which is itself loosely based on ‘A Christmas Carol’. Like ‘A Christmas Carol’ the protagonist chooses business over love in a crucial part of his life. That Dickens fella is quite central to our idea of Christmas isn’t he. Across other parts of Europe there is a love for more creepy Christmases and I in turn have always been fascinated by European Christmas folklore, myths and stories. Krampus is a horned half-goat, half human sidekick to Saint Nick who punishes the badly behaved children whilst Santa gives the good ones presents. ‘Krampus’ the movie was made in 2015 and should maybe be avoided by youngest family members. This also goes for the wonderful ‘Rare Exports (A Christmas Tale)’, a 2010 Finnish movie about a company who trap and export wild Santas around the world.

The most recent addition to my list is ‘’The Holdovers’, which I feel was seriously underrated at the Oscars last year. ‘The Holdovers’ is more like the older Christmas classics, like ‘The Bishop’s Wife’, ‘The Apartment’ and ‘The Shop Around the Corner’ and this time of year the classics should be top of anyone’s watch list. So when you’ve finished listening to my recommended Christmas music, get the snacks out, pour yourself a drink of whatever makes you happy and watch a Christmas movie. Here are a few you might chose from.

Top 10 Christmas Movies (in no particular order)