christmas mediocrity

   The thing is... I love Christmas!  I love everything about it, giving and receiving gifts, the lights, the decorations and decorated trees, getting together with family, stockings hung by the chimney with care, visions of sugar plumbs... but there is another very big part of Christmas which may be my absolute favorite.  Christmas movies and music.

  What other holiday has it’s own section at the music or movie store?  They’re so incredibly marketable that they require they’re own section, though this may have less to do with trying to find the most accurate way of classifying them and more to do with the fact that most often a Christmas album or film is just not held to the same standard, instead they lean on something that I call “the Holiday Effect” by which a mediocre song or movie gets played on television and the radio not because it has any good qualities but rather because it is Christmas.

  

Can anyone name the last Christmas album to win a Grammy? As far as I can tell it was Stephen Colbert for best comedy album.  What was the last Christmas movie to win an Academy award?  Apparently when it comes time to hand out awards this genre gets forgotten, but not because they can’t be enjoyed for what they are but rather because they are intended to get you into the Christmas spirit and the Christmas spirit knows very little of good art.

Every year just after Thanksgiving I put “Christmas Vacation” into my DVD player and watch it with the same joy, laughing at the same points as I do every year.  I will continue to watch this movie at least four more times during the holidays including Christmas Eve.  For me Christmas isn’t Christmas without it and this is exactly why Hollywood continues to make these movies.  For most of us we all have these movies that we are compelled to watch during the holidays.  Some are good some are okay and some are just bad but as long at they contain at lease three of these five elements we forgive all their flaws in service to the holiday spirit.

1. Movie must contain at lease one miracle that we normally would gag at in any other movie but cry at in a Christmas movie.
2. Movie must contain snow.
3. Movie must contain some sort of fatal disease preferably Cancer which may or may not be cured by the conclusion and will depend on what kind of movie it is.
4. Movie must contain at lease one appearance by Santa Clause.
5. Movie must contain a man and a woman divorced or not getting back together or together for the first time.

  While some holiday movies may not contain three or any and those often are the stand out’s, snow often is a fail safe to get any Christmas movie in the right mood and I think you would be hard pressed to find just one which doesn’t at the very least have snow.  To sum up these movies the fact is that some are good and some are bad but I will literally watch any Christmas movie during the holidays including “The Christmas Clause”  Starring Leah Thompson in what must be one of the most cliched movies ever contrived and yet somehow amid the thousands of stories and scripts that are passing through the hands of Hollywood executives this is what gets made, and I promise you that the only reason this thing airs every year on the Hallmark channel is because as horribly awful as it might be we can’t get enough of the Holiday themed films.

Who doesn’t have a Christmas album out?  I understand why they make them, 90% of the songs on a Christmas album are classics and require no song writing at all, and all the religious hymns are public domain and require no rights to be secured.  Because we all know these songs the albums hold little surprise and make us say, “Sure I love Jingle Bells, but I haven’t heard Justin Bieber sing it,” and so he makes a Christmas album which could easily have been recorded over the course of an evening they take a picture of him wearing a Santa hat put it on the cover and print up a couple million copies.  While I couldn’t tell you a thing about any Justin Bieber song other than he sounds like a little girl, I can say I would probably listen to it, just in the same way that I can’t stand to listen to Mariah Cary but love, love, love “All I want for Christmas is you.”

There are also the so bad they’re great songs one example being Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” take all the Christmas out of that and you just have a really skull numbing jingle which is almost enough to make you forget the Paul McCartney was a member of the Beatles the most popular band of the 20th century.

All of that said we should not forget that there is great Christmas music and great Christmas movies which don’t lean on the “holiday effect” and sure we eat those up just as much as the terrible ones but there is something really festive about watching “elf” or “Prancer” or “the Santa Clause” and basking in the Christmasness of it all.

Then once in a great while something comes along which leans so perfectly on the “Holiday effect” that it should be celebrated as a true Christmas miracle.  That of course is “The Christmas shoes” originally a song by New Song it has also been made into a horrible movie starring Rob Lowe.  This movie song combination is perfect in it’s Holiday spirit, about a man who meet a dirty little boy in line at a department store who is trying to buy some shoes for his sick mother who could die at any moment.  The little boy goes so far as to ask this gentleman for help purchasing said shoes which he then does.  It may come to no surprise that the nice man and the the ailing mother get together in the movie version.  It hits on all the Christmas movie and song themes that it is almost meta christmas.

  Yes, I love all Christmas movies and music no matter how bad or good they may be.  I don’t love them equally but I will enjoy them all, even though I know that most are all marketing and that Hollywood is fully aware of the “Hollywood Effect.”  I won’t be celebrating any high art but rather will be basking in the glow of Christmas mediocrity.