December books: 6/4 (A Wonderful Christmas Crime and Writing While the World Burns)
The other night we watched the Christmas Chronicles, which, while not a new movie (it came out in 2018), was a new movie to us. This is something we go through each Christmas season, where we look for new Christmas movies we’ve never seen, and I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to sneak my favorites in.
It’s a difference in media consumption in general. Nowadays you can stream basically ever movie ever made somehow or another. Why settle for the familiar when you can try something new? There’s so much out there to see!
I tried to explain this to my kids last week, how we used to re-watch the same things over and over, because that’s all we had. Your movie options included the videos you yourself owned and whatever the local video rental store had in stock. I was rather poor growing up, so trips to the video store were limited, and we definitely didn’t have HBO or another service where you could watch newer movies.
In fact, for most of my formative years, we lived in a small mountain town (it’s still quite small to this day, despite massive growth in many mountain towns), where our video rental options were the Safeway three towns over (cheaper, and we were there fairly regularly because it was also the closest grocery store) or a store in town which I remember renting from maybe twice, so I can only assume it was wildly more expensive.
Christmas feels like a time for tradition, and one of our traditions growing up was our Christmas movie marathon, which my sister and I did each Christmas Eve after dinner to whenever we fell asleep for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember the exact rotation of shows, but it was Rudolph and Frosty, the Grinch, and my personal favorite, A Muppet Family Christmas, which includes not just the Muppets but the Sesame Street characters and the Fraggles.
(They never released A Muppet Family Christmas on video. Our copy was taped off a broadcast. I have found it on YouTube in its entirety, complete with 80s commercials, if one is so inclined.)
So, each Christmas, I find myself trying to watch my favorites in direct competition with everyone else’s urge to watch new movies. But it’s something I run into in general, as well. I want to show my kids the movies that I enjoyed as a kid, and generally I can get away with that, but rewatching something we’ve already seen? Oh, no, we can’t have that.
Sometimes you just want a comfort movie, you know?
Which camp do you fall into, squiders? Are you a rewatcher of favorites, or an only new movies person?
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a merry one, and I’ll see you guys next week.
