Most blogs have routines they observe in terms of how they structure posts, both for the convenience of readers and to assist blog authors in keeping themselves on the tracks, so to speak, and this blog is no exception. As noted in a previous post, I’ve got a set of things I’ll be doing in each movie’s review here, and I wanted them to be clear from the beginning.

First of all, every post will begin with a brief review essay from me tackling how I think the movie works, what it made me think of, where its themes resonated with me and where I think it fell short. There’s no real format for this, and it will vary over time and in reaction to different kinds of movies. These will inevitably spoil some portions of the movie’s early going, but I’ll try to avoid giving everything away — more negative reviews I expect will likely reveal more plot details, but even there I’ll try not to reveal too much, and in more positive reviews I think you can count on me wanting to leave the movie with plenty of secrets for you to enjoy.

After the initial review essay’s done, I’ll take on the following sections — first of all, I will try with each blog post to offer three recurring features for each film, though not every movie will supply material for each of these:

• I Know That Face: Who in this film is someone you might recognize from another holiday movie?  This might not be possible in every single film, but whenever I can, I’ll try to call attention to it – especially folks in much more supporting roles who might otherwise be overlooked.
• That Takes Me Back: Half the fun of old holiday movies, for me, are the moments when you see or hear things that bring you back to the past somehow, whether it’s days you know from your childhood or things you’ve only ever seen in a Currier and Ives lithograph.  I won’t spotlight every single element of a movie that’s nostalgic, especially ones that are set a long time ago (or were filmed a long time ago), but I’ll try to call attention to moments or scenes that really hit that note for me.
• I Understood that Reference: Holiday media is so internally referential that, where I can, I want to call attention to times in a movie when you’re hearing a reference to other stories or films that are also holiday themed.  It’s fun to think of the ways in which the characters in these films actually know the genre they’re also appearing in.

After those features are handled, I’ll always conclude with some simple scoring/tallying elements for each film. I’m not trying to create an overall set of rankings here, but I do feel like it’s useful to talk about the ways in which any holiday movie might be measured, depending on what you’re going to the movie to get.

• Holiday Vibes: On a scale from 1 to 10, how much does this tap into the feeling of the season?  This can take many forms – traditional story elements, iconic moments (Santa’s lap, lighting the tree, family gathered at the dinner table), emotional beats that connect to holiday celebration for many of us, etc.  The category’s totally separate from any sense of quality, so a higher score here only means that it puts me (James) more in a holiday frame of mind or lends me as a viewer a more definitively holiday vibe – not necessarily that I think it’s doing this with artistic skill, etc.
• Actual Quality: Again, a scale of 1 to 10, how great is this as a work of art?  How good a movie did I just watch?  A totally subjective judgment here, based on my (James’s) own ideas about what makes something worthwhile/enjoyable.
• Party Mood-Setter: Is this a good choice for a movie to leave on in the background while you’re baking cookies or decorating the tree or hosting a little holiday get-together, given that this is how many of us interact with holiday movies at least some of the time?  I’d like to treat this as a simple “yes/no” question, but I expect I’ll usually be qualifying my answer to some extent.
• Plucked Heart Strings: On balance, is this likely to make your eyes well up with tears, either out of overwhelming joy or devastating sadness (both of them classic holiday moods)?  Again, this is totally subjective, and I’ll at least try to treat it as a simple “yes/no” toggle.
• Recommended Frequency: James offers a final suggestion, that may run anywhere from “never sit down to watch even part of this” through “this belongs in your rotation every year”, based on all the above.

Every post will conclude with me supplying the most accurate hyperlinks I can offer to where you can legally access a copy of the film to watch for yourself, if you’d like. Accurate, at least, as of the time I scheduled the post, though I’ll try to maintain those links periodically so they remain useful. Again, as previously noted, I get no money from any service or site I’m linking to, so follow those links based on your own preferences for who to do business with, etc. I strongly encourage you, too, to make use of your local library’s media collection, since for many of you, these films are available on disc (or via a library streaming service like Hoopla) for free!

There may, over time, be other ways of writing about these films that emerge, but at least for the 2024 season, I think you can expect me to stick to these structures. I’m hoping they make it fun for you to read and think about holiday movies you know well, as well as films you’ve never even heard of. Certainly my aim is to give you a real buffet table of possibility here, and to share both some films I’ve loved as well as some films that either confused or bothered me. Thanks for stopping by Film for the Holidays — I hope you’ll enjoy what I’m doing enough to make this a regular stop this season (and I encourage you to sign up for the post by email, using the subscription option, if you find that more convenient). You’ll see the first film arrive on Friday: until then, happy holidays to you!

Welcome to the newest blog project by James Rosenzweig, Film for the Holidays, a holiday film retrospective that will post one new film each day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In this post I’ll detail some simple things about the project, which I hope will persuade you that it’s worth reading, but if there’s anything I don’t answer, please feel free to ask in the comments. Now, without further ado:

Why are you doing this?
This is a question my wife asks me pretty regularly, so I figure I should start with it. I am in general someone who turns things into blog projects: any of you who are veterans of my efforts to read every Pultizer Prize winning novel in chronological order, or to read and appreciate the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (both The Lord of the Rings and the adaptation in The Rings of Power), or to make weird sandwiches from the 1920s (admit it, you’re starting to understand my wife’s perspective here) will know that I just generally like to write reflectively about experiences I’m having, even if the likely audience is small. And I’m also someone who has long been really fascinated by the “holiday movie” as a genre: for years now, I’ve had a steady rotation of classics I always watch, but I’m always looking for “new” movies (even though most of them are of course pretty old) and I try out several of them every year. At some point, I realized that I’d taken in enough curious or strange or forgotten holiday movies that it would be fun to share my thoughts about these things in general with others. I sketched out some plans, wrote up some sample posts, and ended up deciding that I thought it would be worth trying to do this. I’ve never written film criticism, and I won’t pretend to come to the work with any deep academic training in it, but I think I’m a good enough writer at this point to keep you entertained. We’ll see about that, won’t we?

Is this just going to end up unfinished like most of your blog projects?
Okay, first of all, wow, rude question. But also, fair question! I did worry about that, when I first started thinking about this — I didn’t want this experience to be unsatisfying for readers. So, I’ll make you as much of a promise as a free blog can make: you’re getting 26 film blog posts here in 2024. One will drop every morning from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. I’ve been planning this out for months now, I’ve got a ton of blog posts at least mostly drafted, and there’s a scheduling tool in WordPress (the tool I’m using here) so things should go smoothly. Whether or not I return in 2025, well, I guess it’ll depend to some extent on whether any of you read these things and/or enjoy them enough to say so. If not, surely I’ll end up blogging about something else. I have the sickness.

What will these posts be like?
You’ll find that every post on Film for the Holidays has a similar structure: I’ll detail this in a post in a couple of weeks, just prior to the reviews themselves launching. My plan is that these posts will both give you a broad overview reaction to the film (like any movie review site might offer) while also offering some quirky elements, like letting you know that the maid in that one scene will play Mrs. Claus in a different holiday movie 25 years later, or giving you my take on whether or not I think the movie would work as background media while you and your friends decorate sugar cookies. They’ll probably be wordy, based on literally everything I have ever written, including the post you are reading. But I hope you’ll find that the words are worth your time, or else that having a bunch of little sections makes it easy for you to skim when you want to.

What counts as a holiday movie to you, huh?
All right, Die Hard fans, I see you revving up to come at me in the comments. Look, nobody knows what a holiday movie is, really — everyone can agree that, say, It’s a Wonderful Life and Home Alone are “holiday movies” but there’s lots of tough cases out there. For Film for the Holidays, I’ve decided to be as broad-minded as possible: if a movie is explicitly set at or near Christmas (or any other winter holiday, but I have to be honest, the celebration of Christmas as either a secular or religious holiday is central to most of this genre — I’m keen to find non-Christmas examples though, so don’t be shy about sharing Hanukkah and Winter Solstice and Kwanzaa movies in the comments), and if there’s anything at all in the movie that seems to reference the celebration, I’m counting it. So, yes, Die Hard counts, as will a lot of other movies you wouldn’t think of as “holiday”. My preference is to lean more into movies that are actually working with the celebration of a holiday and/or trying to create those holiday vibes, but I also want there to be a real mix of films represented here. Over the 26 days, you’re going to see films from every decade since the 1930s; you’ll see comedies and dramas, war movies and musicals, hits and flops and films you’ve never heard of in your life. My hope is there’ll be at least a couple real favorites for you in the mix, as well as a couple you want to try out for yourself.

Are you selling these movies, or trying to earn any money off of us?
Nope! At least, not right now, and I can’t really imagine doing so. I’m going to make sure every film’s blog post supplies you with information about how to acquire it, though. Just know that if I’m linking you to a site that sells the film on physical media, I make no money from the sale, and if I’m telling you about a streaming service that carries the movie, again, there’s no kickback to me. If you decide to find the movie somewhere else (especially at your local library), you have my enthusiasic support. Down the road, if anything about this ever changes, I will be 100% transparent about it.

Are you taking suggestions?
So, as I noted earlier, I’ve already pre-scripted most of the 2024 slate, and to be honest, the few posts I haven’t written yet, I do know exactly what films are scheduled. But a) I’d love to keep doing this in 2025, and b) I just am fascinated by holiday movies in general, so if you’ve got suggestions, share them with me! Half the fun of writing about things I care about is getting to hear from other people who care about the same things.

Okay, you’ve sold me…so, what, I have to remember to come to this blog every day?
Not necessarily! I would love to be a part of your daily holiday routine, of course: if instead of doom-scrolling your social media of choice, you come here to escape into an awesome (or awful) holiday movie, I’m happy to provide a space in which to do that. But if you look over on the right edge of your screen near the top of this post, you ought to see a blue Subscribe button (let me know if you don’t). That’ll sign you up for an emailed copy of every post, straight to your inbox. And of course you don’t need to treat this as a daily obligation! Pop in now and then, and just read the posts that look interesting to you. Come by just on Sundays for my A Christmas Carol feature (yep, a different Christmas Carol adaptation every week), which is set up somewhat differently from the post structure I mentioned above. Forget I exist entirely and roam other corners of the Internet to your heart’s content, only to remember this site in six months: it’ll be here.

All right, that’s surely more than you wanted to read about a blog that doesn’t exist yet. I hope you’ll be back, though, when the blog kicks off on the morning of November 29th with 2006’s The Holiday, a romantic comedy featuring Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black, with a title so generically perfect for this blog that I figured it had to be the right place to start. See you then!

As the years roll forward, it’s probably increasingly weird for a blog to begin with a “hello, world” post — a practice that seems so late 20th Century to me, or to date to the Aughts at the latest. But here I am, just testing out this blog’s template/formatting/etc. with a simple post, promising there is more to come. This 2024 holiday season, expect this blog to be populated once a day (if all goes well) with reviews of holiday movies, classic and cult, merry and macabre, nostalgic and novel. I am interested in the art form of the holiday movie, in the ways holidays do and don’t show up on our screens, and in the attachments we form over the years to media that become somehow part of the family in ways that even the most popular and best-beloved media at any other time of year don’t seem to become.

I hope it’ll be amusing, surprising, sometimes sweet, and perhaps even insightful. We’ll see what comes! Thanks for peeking at this, in the meanwhile.