At first glance, it might appear that Christmas films are pretty easy to make. Take a mediocre family film, put everyone in knitted jumpers, have a couple of scenes set at a snowy ice rink where the protagonist delivers some festive dialogue (“brrr, it sure is cold this mid-to-late December”), and just like that, you’ve got a film like Daddy’s Home 2 , a film so Christmassy it’s made everyone in the world forget all those things Mel Gibson said about Jews and black people .
But creating a classic Christmas movie is actually quite hard. For one thing, the original story of Christmas is kind of a snoozefest — “I gave birth in a barn and then a bunch of academics gave me some gold” is a killer anecdote to liven up a dinner party, but not a great basis for 2,000 years of storytelling. For a Christmas movie to really pop, it needs some magic ingredients. After extensive research (hey, I’ve read more than 10 plot summaries of Christmas movies on Wikipedia) I can reveal the secret elements for creating the most joyous Christmas movies ever!
Murderous criminals
All good Christmas movies feature a few people who have killed before and will kill again. What would Die Hard be without Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber and his terrorist team of Baywatch rejects? It would be a film about Bruce Willis making awkward small talk at his estranged wife’s office Christmas party. Home Alone, without Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, is effectively 90 minutes of boring child neglect. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (a future classic Christmas movie, if only for the bizarre fact that all the bad guys are named after Santa’s reindeer ) would just be Kevin James riding a Segway around an empty mall (admittedly that’s arguably a better film).
In fact, the tale of a group of criminals attempting to burgle a vulnerable building before being defeated by a rogue hero is now pretty much a classic Christmas story, the 21st-century version of A Christmas Carol. In 20 years’ time there will probably be a Muppet version of it, where Kermit has to stealth around office vents with bloody feet and garotte Muppet members of Hans Gruber’s team (inevitably played by Christoph Waltz).
Attempted suicide
What Christmas movie is complete without a couple of miserable people deciding to end it all? Obviously the big one here is It’s a Wonderful Life , wherein Jimmy Stewart almost jumps to his death, driven by the Human Embodiment of Hypercapitalism (Mr Potter), and is only stopped by a man in a nightie. But it comes up in a surprising number of other Christmas films: in Trading Places , Dan Ackroyd tries to kill himself after being made destitute on a whim by the super-rich Duke brothers, while in Scrooged , Bobcat Goldthwait goes on a rampage in a TV studio after being fired by Bill Murray, who is basically the unshrivelled American version of Rupert Murdoch.
It’s worth noting that every one of these characters is pushed towards suicide by the worst excesses of capitalism: in fact, most Christmas films have a pseudo-communist edge to them (people are more important than money, commercialisation is evil, follow the star). Remember parents — if you see your kids watching too many Christmas films this year, try to balance it out with some pro-capitalist media too: the animated Animal Farm, a documentary on Warren Buffet and a bingewatch of Theo Paphitis-era Dragons’ Den.
Accidental manslaughter
If you can’t fit in a murderer or a suicide, try to make sure at least one of your characters is responsible for the death of an innocent. At the very start of (U-certified) The Santa Clause, Tim Allen causes Santa Claus to fall off his roof to his death. After the first 15 minutes, which are effectively an extended Christmas special of an Injury Lawyers 4U advert, it only gets weirder. Due to the death occurring on his property, Tim Allen is forced to give up his old life as Scott Calvin and is pressed into servitude as Santa Claus. Not only that, he becomes a host body for a parasite known as “the Christmas Spirit”, which makes him put on weight and grow a beard against his will. By the end of the movie, Scott Calvin no longer exists — there is only Santa Claus.
The best Christmas movies challenge children, making them ask questions like: “What happened to the body of the old Santa Claus?”; “Did the entire identity of Scott Calvin deserve to be erased from the Earth?”; and “How did this get two sequels?”
Ultimately doomed marriages
There are countless failed marriages in Christmas movies, and most of them are in Love Actually. Emma Thompson and the cheating Alan Rickman are clearly doomed, but all the other marriages in that movie are also fatally undermined: Andrew Lincoln destroys Keira Knightley’s marriage to Chiwetel Ejiofor by turning up on her doorstep with a stack of cuecards and a lack of understanding about boundaries; Martine McCutcheon would have left prime minister Hugh Grant after years of press intrusion; and Colin Firth and Lucia Moniz don’t speak the same language and rushed into marriage mostly based on him falling into a pond.
Special mention has to go to Elf as well, which ends with an oversized elf with questionable understanding of modern society marrying a sophisticated New Yorker 13 years his junior. Either Zooey Deschanel’s character would have divorced him before next Christmas or Will Ferrell’s character would have died trying to use a microwave.
The best Christmas movies should challenge your very understanding of civil society. Miracle on 34th Street (1994), in which Father Christmas is put on trial by the state of New York, does that and so much more. There’s so much to unpack in this movie — at one point Father Christmas is facing life in a mental institution, and at another point it’s heavily implied he has the power to make women magically pregnant — but the highlight is the conclusion of the court case, in which the judge, upon realising that all money has “In God We Trust” on it, rules that people can believe in Richard Attenborough as Santa Claus without proof because the US government trusts in the existence of God without proof.
This is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most terrifyingly libertarian legal judgments to ever be recorded on film. Sure, it gets Kris Kringle off the hook, but at what cost? It effectively legitimises the idea that all evidence-based reasoning can be dismissed, challenges the very concept of objective truth and would, followed to its logical conclusion, lead to the end of the rule of law and the destruction of civilisation as we know it. And really, in the end, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer. He was awarded the 2012-13 BBC Radio Comedy Writers Bursary and created the BBC Radio 4 sitcom The Lentil Sorters
