Hello, my name is James W. Rosenzweig — you may remember me from such partially completed blog projects as Following Pulitzer, 700 Sandwiches, or Reading the Silmarillion. (Okay, technically I did finish both the Pandemic LOTR readthrough and the Reading the Second Age blog in preparation for the first season of The Rings of Power….clearly Tolkien at least sometimes keeps me motivated?) Starting a blog to chronicle some weird fascination of mine is clearly one of my hobbies; another of them, for years now, has been my interest in viewing and thinking about the holiday movie. The website you’re at now is the result of those two key factors.
I’ll leave more material elsewhere on the site to explain how I’m structuring the blog and its posts. Here I’ll just acknowledge that I am an amateur when it comes to both film criticism and the celebration of holidays — an amateur in the best, oldest sense of the word, in that I am motivated by love (“amare” in the Latin) in both endeavors, rather than by any particular professional training. But I’m an academic by trade, and someone who has at least on occasion taught very simple film criticism to college freshmen, so if I periodically seem to be taking either myself or my writing a little too seriously, that may serve as a partial explanation.
I’m glad you’re here. I hope you find in my words on this site some gentle spurs to embrace again holiday films you’ve loved (even if I hated them), to rediscover old movies you’ve long forgotten (if you ever knew them in the first place), and to take a leap into something new or strange that you never thought you’d want to try. No matter what I say here, about motion pictures or the ways they reflect the holiday experiences I know, my hope is to celebrate the best in film and the best in festivals, and in some small way enhance both your and my experience of them both. Cheers to you, and happy holidays!
