Film for the Holidays is back in 2025

Friends, it’s been a year. And what a year it’s been.

Creating this blog in 2024 was an adventure—I’d started plenty of blog projects ambitiously, but I’d rarely been able to finish what I started. I knew that the world probably didn’t need yet another website devoted to holiday movies, and I wasn’t sure that I’d have anything worth saying about them. But I gave it a go, and so did you: thank you!

I’d been weighing whether or not to return to this work for 2025, since obviously it’s a little daunting to commit again to a couple dozen more movie reviews. But I have to say, it was a lot of fun talking about films people know (and ones they don’t know), and getting some of your reactions. The year 2025 has brought with it a lot of stress and sadness, in my life and in many other people’s lives, and it seems to me that getting to dwell on a bunch more holiday flicks, whether good or bad, would supply some badly-needed escape for me and maybe for you also. So, this is my renewed promise: if you come to this blog looking for it, you’ll see a new movie review every single day from the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve. And if you’d rather get these posts via email, you can subscribe to the blog and WordPress will send them straight to your inbox.

The responses to last year’s post-Christmas survey were really positive and helpful—it turns out everything I’m doing here is working for at least some of you, so my plan is to do it all again (and let you skip past the sections you don’t care about). The collection of films I’ll be reviewing in 2025 has now been posted at the page that lists Films covered this year. You won’t know which day I’m doing which film (in part because that’s a little up in the air, at the outset), but you’ve got the chance to decide to get ahead of me if you want. Just like last year, I’ll be covering films from every decade from the 1930s to the 2020s. I’ll be watching some classics and some forgotten old gems and some things that have been really justly forgotten. Some of the things I watch will barely seem like holiday movies to you, but that’s part of the fun, taking in motion pictures that use the holidays as a backdrop or a transitional phase as well as those that are completely fixated on tinsel and gingerbread and stockings hung by the chimney. The mix is intentionally skewed positively—last year 18 of the 26 films got a 7.5/10 or better in terms of quality—because I feel better praising things than tearing them down, but I promise to make sure to watch at least a few real stinkers since folks do love a negative review (and I get it, I really do!).

I just wanted you to know—the blog is alive and it’s already in progress. Behind the scenes, puns are being refined, actors’ IMDBs are being scoured, and I’m trying to figure out how the heck I can quantify a film’s holidayness on a scale of 1-10. If you had any fun with this last year, welcome back. If you’re new to what I’m up to at FFTH, you can skim the List of previous year’s film ratings to get a broad sense overall, or scroll through the site or use the tags in the right sidebar (on larger screens; on phones it’s probably at the bottom of the page) to read a review or three. I hope you see something you enjoy enough that it’s worth sticking around, or bookmarking it to come back to. Here’s to another year of seasonal fun!