HIPPIELUVN'S CHRISTMAS QUEST 2015

[hippieluvn]

Hi friends and Happy Thanksgiving

Each year during the turkey days of fall...

My wife and I watch the Harry Potter film saga...

Or, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogies...

This year we watched the latter and just finished...

Now it's time to begin my Christmas movie marathon...

Just like Halloween and spring break/summertime...

I always watch holiday-themed movies and TV shows...

And this year I'll share my watching habits here with you all...

Hope you have a wonderful holiday season with family & friends

[hippieluvn]

The first film of the xmas quest is always The Wizard of Oz...

This film plays annually on television around Thanksgiving...

And I've always watched it at this time since my childhood...

Yesterday afternoon, this classic film was playing on TBS

[hippieluvn]

Immediately after watching The Wizard of Oz, I switched channels and saw a new classic...

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Home Alone and it was playing last night on AMC

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, thanks for this thread! I actually have difficulty finding Christmas movies I like. Maybe you can jog my memory!

[MauEvig]

I can think of several Christmas movies actually. ^^; Depends on if you're going for a more "grown up" kind of movie or a kid's movie.

And Technically...The Nightmare before Christmas qualifies as both a Halloween and a Christmas movie!

Some good views would probably be...

Rise of the Guardians (This one is more adventurous and a kid's movie, it has Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in it)

For comedies I recommend....

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Jeff Dunham's Christmas special (if you like stand up comedy)
Christmas with the Kranks
The Santa Clause (The original was best, but I did like the second one. The third one got a little crazy and out of hand)
My mom loves Home Alone and Home Alone II: Lost In New York by the way...but when they got to Home Alone III It was kind of lame because it wasn't the same kid and I don't think it took place during Christmas either.
Elf (Another family friendly comedy)

And technically the first Gremlins qualifies because it takes place at Christmas...and we Halloween fans love a good movie that involves little monster critters in it.

I do have Sonic's Christmas Blast...it's not the greatest but me being a Sonic fan it was a must have to have in my Sonic collection. Oddly enough the story puts a lot of emphasis on having presents.
Another good kid's special would probably be the My Little Pony Hearth's Warming's Eve special
Other cartoon and sitcom Christmas specials.

For classics I would probably recommend "It's a Wonderful Life" a little Trivia is that a scene from that movie appears in National Lampoon's Christmas vacation

And of course you have to have all the cartoon classics like Frosty the Snowman, Charlie Brown's Christmas, Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is coming to town, the year without a Santa clause etc...

I did enjoy Arthur Christmas and thought it was cute.

There's tons of them actually. My mom is a huge Christmas movie person so of course I know a lot of Christmas movies. Not an exhaustive list of suggestions. ^^;

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, I have an assortment of Christmas movies in a special album I keep, but I don't like many that are popular. For instance, I own Elf, but I don't really like it that much and almost never watch it.

At the end of Thanksgiving weekend, my daughter & I watched Love Actually, which we both love. We also really like The Holiday.

For kid-friendly fare, I would probably go with A Christmas Story, The Santa Clause, Charlie Brown, Rudolph, and (cartoon) Grinch. Also Frozen, even though it isn't really about Christmas.

I do like It's a Wonderful Life. I also like The Family Man, which is somewhat similar to it, sort of an inversion.

My favorite secular Christmas story is A Christmas Carol. I read it every year. My favorite screen version of that is George C. Scott's (1984), although there are a plethora of them, and I own two or three.

Since we keep Christmas as a religious holiday, we also have a smallish collection of religious films we associate with it. Ben-Hur (a huge favorite at our house) is played at both Christmas & Easter. The Nativity is a much better movie than the critics allowed, I think. I also love the documentary Bethlehem Star, which you can learn about if you visit http://www.bethtlehemstar.com.

Christmas means music, and we have the Celtic Woman Christmas concert on DVD, which is quite good. Also I have Rick Steves' European Christmas, which talks about the seasonal customs of several European countries. And I have the old Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire movie Holiday Inn, which introduced the song White Christmas. The plot is fluff, but the musical numbers are excellent.

Finally, I really love the anti-war film Joyeaux Noel, about the impromptu Christmas truce that happened along the front line in WWI (1914).

[Kolchak]

Movies: Christmas Comes to Willow Creek. Miracle on 34th Street(original version) Ernest Saves Christmas. Scrooged. The Bells of Saint Mary's. White Christmas.

Music: Andy Williams. Mel Torme. Bing Crosby. Herb Alpert. Barry Manilow. Neil Diamond. Mitch Miller. Chicago. REO Speedwagon. Straight No Chaser. Boyz II Men. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. Pentatonix. Michael Buble. John Denver. Boston Pops. Robert Shaw. Nat King Cole. Mannheim Steamroller. Trans Siberian Railroad. Hall & Oats. Johnny Mathis. Josh Groban. Jimmy Buffet. KC and the Sunshine Band. Earth, Wind and Fire. Rod Stewart.

[Murfreesboro]

Good assortment!

I thought of another holiday movie I like, While You Were Sleeping. Another romantic comedy set at Christmastime.

And I also remembered that last year, I totally fell in love with a DVD of Trace Adkins' Christmas concert from 2013. I had never much listened to him before, but I loved his arrangement of We Three Kings at the Rockefeller Center tree-lighting back in '13. Turns out that was from a Christmas album he did and promoted with this concert. He explores the kinships between country music and Celtic music, which are many. That man is an awesome bass.

[Murfreesboro]

I'm going to try to bring over a link to the youtube of Trace Adkins singing "We Three Kings" from the tree-lighting (in 2012, apparently):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qzsxXMVKh8

I realize now that he actually cut the song for this performance. On his DVD, he sings all the verses, and it is even better.

[Kolchak]

I almost forgot. Restless Heart has a really good Christmas album and so does Christopher Cross.

[hippieluvn]

Pandora to launch Seinfeld-inspired 'Festivus' station

Think I'll watch this holiday-themed episode today...

One of best episodes of one of the best TV sitcoms...

"A Festivus for the rest of us!"

[MauEvig]

The Holiday is a nice one. There's even a nod to Hannukah in it. I actually liked this one even though I'm more of a Fantasy/Science Fiction nerd. ^^;

[hippieluvn]

My favorite secular Christmas story is A Christmas Carol. I read it every year. My favorite screen version of that is George C. Scott's (1984), although there are a plethora of them, and I own two or three.

I'm surprised that you view Dickens' A Christmas Carol as secular. I see it as a great moral tale with religious overtones, especially given the holiday being celebrated.

[Murfreesboro]

There is one reference to Jesus in it, not called Jesus, but something like "apart from the Great Founder--if anything in it can be said to be apart from that" (quoting from memory). Otherwise, the values are religious, but there is nothing overtly religious about it (Scrooge goes to church in the last canto, but there is no description of the service).

For one year, twelve years ago, I taught English to a group of intellectually advanced 7th graders (this was in the public schools). We were required to teach at least one novel from an approved list during the school year, and I chose Dickens' Christmas Carol. Most of the kids were ecstatic to read it, but I had one Muslim girl in the class whose dad requested that she read something else. I held my ground. I said it was not about Jesus, but was a secular book, a ghost story, that was called "A Christmas Carol" because it takes place at that time of year. That it is a foundational book in Western culture, one that gets imitated and parodied over and over again, and that knowing it was just as important as knowing the Greek myths. Her dad relented, and she read the book along with her classmates. Afterwards she told me that it had been a nice story and that she was glad she had read it.

The idea of redemption through love for one's fellow man derives from Christianity, but I would say there is no real theological content in Christmas Carol. A religious story would have linked Scrooge's change of heart more obviously to Jesus's sacrificial love. Scrooge's redemption is effected primarily through a sort of psychological journey, I think. Undoubtedly Dickens expected his audience to be Christian. He wasn't trying to teach them the fundamentals of their faith.

[MauEvig]

What about the reference to "Making lame men walk and blind men see?" I know there was a scene in there I think either Bob or Tiny Tim said it.