Monday Musings:The Ultimate Family-Friendly Christmas Movie List

(Before we dive into the movie stuff, let me give a quick THANK YOU to everyone who has chipped in to help us raise over $10,000 for author Sandi Rog to help pay for her cancer treatments. If you’re a writer, DO NOT MISS the drawing on Christmas Eve. And if you’re not a writer, DO NOT MISS the drawings going on 4 times this week for gift cards to Amazon.com–we have 2 $50 cards and 2 $100 cards! Details here.)

I’ll tell you straight off: if you came here looking for the ultimate family-friendly Christmas movie list, you’re going to be disappointed. I haven’t actually made it yet. That’s really why I’m posting–to hear from you all what movie(s) you think belong on the list.

As a child, the ultimate Christmas movie was It’s A Wonderful Life. It was sort of a family joke, actually–somehow it became this object of near-obsession; we even bought a script book one year when it was released for some anniversary or another. Any question asked about the holiday was answered with, “It’s A Wonderful Life!” (Including when my parents were playing Pictionary at the Willow Creek Church staff Christmas party and my dad guessed it for every drawing–he was actually right on the last one!) But the older I get, the more poignant the movie is to me, and now it’s my own personal tradition to put it in on Christmas Eve once the girls are asleep, make a giant mug of hot chocolate, and wrap all the presents before heading to bed. I still get a knot in my stomach when Uncle Billy loses the money in the bank. I still cry when the whole town shows up at the end with the cash to bail out the Building & Loan. The theology might be a little fishy, but the message of the movie cannot be topped: You matter. I matter. Everyone matters.

Dan’s favorite is A Christmas Carol, so long as it’s the version with either Patrick Stewart or George C. Scott playing Scrooge. I adore Stewart, but must admit I have a difficult time separating him from Captain Picard, so as much as I love to watch him, I think I’d choose the Scott version over the Stewart one just so I’m not constantly being pulled out of the story by memories of Star Trek.

My girls, if you asked them, would likely choose A Charlie Brown Christmas, and only partly because it’s the only Christmas movie they’ve ever seen. They also get a kick out of Snoopy. But really, you can’t beat the recitation of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth delivered by Linus, blanket in hand, on the stage of their Christmas production. I love that this still gets shown on TV. In wonder how long it’ll last before it gets censored. Heaven forbid we remind people why we celebrate Christmas in the first place.

Now it’s your turn. What are your family’s favorite Christmas movies, and why? Let’s get a list compiled that we can come back to next year when the season is upon us to help us get into that Christmas spirit.