One of the greatest Christmas songs is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, which Judy Garland sings in Meet Me in St Louis – a deeply nostalgic Gilded Age period drama set 40 years before its 1944 release.
The song’s stoic melancholy reveals how World War II had separated viewers from their loved ones: ‘Someday soon, we all will be together / If the fates allow / Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.’
This time of year has a way of sharpening loss or estrangement – and to soothe it, we seek out cosy tales about the comfort and joy of human togetherness. But do Christmas movies and TV merely lull us with clichés?
Case in point: Netflix film The Merry Gentlemen is like The Full Monty, but without the class consciousness. Sacked from her Christmas-themed Broadway show – for being ‘old’, not because she can’t dance for shit – Ashley (Britt Robertson) returns home to smalltown Sycamore Creek, where she puts together an extremely tame ‘male revue’ to raise $30,000 in rent arrears from her parents’ failing live music bar.
Ashley begs their landlord Denise (Maria Canals-Barrera), ‘The Rhythm Room is so important to this town!’ But that’s clearly not true, or it wouldn’t be in this pickle! Stranger still, rather than rallying the townsfolk behind an allegedly beloved cultural institution, sharing a feelgood story to local media, or even using her professional networks to rally audiences, Ashley and her friends merely hand out flyers advertising ‘male strippers’ without even mentioning this is a fundraiser!
Two things about this film broke me: that Ashley makes an elaborate, Santa-themed fundraising-tracker board but hides it in a back room where only her family and the Merry Gentlemen can see it; and that after they proudly pay back Denise on Christmas Day, they invite her to Christmas lunch. This woman was happy to see them evicted on Boxing Day!
So, which Christmas stories genuinely explore the joy of community?
A public celebration
Paradoxically, the earnest Christmas message about valuing people over property often comes gift-wrapped in consumerism – from feasts, decorations and presents to Santa in Coca-Cola drag. More noticeably, Christmas films often celebrate a privatised togetherness. As Margaret Thatcher famously opined of society: “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families …’
But ‘holiday spirit’ circulates in public, among people with loose social ties. People mingle to admire Christmas decorations, watch pageants, sing carols, volunteer at local events, and otherwise be in easy, non-transactional company. It’s Christmassy to feel connected to strangers.
That’s why my cherished Christmas Eve ritual is to watch Carols by Candlelight on Channel 9, live from Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl, and tweet my reactions alongside people all over the country. (Although I’ll be doing it on Bluesky this year.)
CBC is a pageant in the truest sense. Its Vision Australia fundraiser format was perfected long ago. (Carols in the Domain – Channel 7’s Sydney event stuffed with venal sponcon – can only imitate it.) The performers have this gig for life and are like baubles unpacked once a year – Silvie Paladino! Denis Walter! Marina Prior! Anthony Callea! David Hobson!
Because we know the ritual – people make bingo cards – CBC is about small surprises, like what ill-advised costumes people will wear, and which current musical’s formally attired cast will heinously mash up their show’s signature number with a Christmas carol. (This year’s candidates include Sister Act, Tina, the thematically gun-jumping Jesus Christ Superstar, and the dreadful Dear Evan Hansen. What a mess! I can’t wait!)
Who’ll be among the Superannuated Rockers cutting very mildly sick to an upbeat pop standard? When will we first spot Hair Guy: the Melbourne Gospel Choir member with the sucked-mango coiffure? Will they cut to a shot of a sleeping baby in the crowd during ‘Away in a Manger’, or in ‘Silent Night’? And will musical director John Foreman muff the cringey cymbal clash that for years has ended the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?
Whether I’m home alone, with friends or with family, I’m enjoying one of television’s few remaining genuinely live, communal spectacles. What a Christmas gift.
Ho-ho-home
Christmas movies love home more than Dorothy Gale, and family more than Dominic Toretto. For this we can thank Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; published in 1843, when secular Christmas customs were in flux, it baked family feasts into English tradition like a sixpence into a pudding.
Dickens wrote to his friend, literary critic John Forster, that his ‘Carol philosophy’ contained ‘a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home and Fireside’. So, what makes Die Hard Christmassy is John McClane’s quest to retrieve his estranged wife, the festively named Holly, from the temerity of a career.
While I’ll restrain myself from the Christmas cliché of hating on Love Actually (2003), it is striking how that film treats work and home as oil and water: things that don’t mix, but might emulsify if you shake them as hard as Hugh Grant shakes his arse to the Pointer Sisters.
It’s more beguiling to swaddle the characters in a domestic bubble that temporarily evacuates everyday concerns. In Alexander Payne’s charmingly old-fashioned The Holdovers, the bubble incubates a ‘found family’ out of the lost souls left behind at a boarding school.
But that cosiness can feel suffocatingly airless. That’s why I enjoy a Christmas film that questions or subverts ‘home’ and ‘family’. In Todd Haynes’s Carol, two queer women create their own defiantly romantic Christmas bubble, despite knowing it could pop at any time. Meanwhile, Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas makes a mumblecore mess of the holiday as a young family is forced to accommodate a sloppy hipster boozehound.
Unusually, ‘Fishes’, the flashback episode in season 2 of The Bear, totally refuses to sentimentalise the stressful Berzatto family Christmas, or to cloak their hostility in comedy the way National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation does. However, Tyler Taormina’s recent Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point uses a similar observational gaze in a more tender way that allows domestic dynamics to surface more delicately.
The neighbourhood
When Christmas movies aren’t ignoring neighbours completely, they can treat them as scary threats, annoying meddlers or just background colour. In Home Alone, where sole occupancy goes hand in hand with violence, Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) readily believes his brother Buzz’s (Devin Ratray) story that their neighbour Mr Marley (Roberts Blossom) murdered his family with a snow shovel. This lonely old man is out there shovelling snow so his wealthy neighbours won’t slip over!
Similarly, many people enjoy the Cameron Diaz/Jude Law plotline in The Holiday – the traditional, idyllic, domestic-bubble rom-com – but I prefer the Kate Winslet/Jack Black plotline set in Los Angeles, in which Iris (Winslet) befriends Amanda’s (Diaz) elderly neighbour Arthur (Eli Wallach) and discovers his history as an Oscar-winning screenwriter. Had Amanda, so caught up in her own drama, ever bothered to say hello?
Maybe let’s revisit Nora Ephron’s 1994 workplace black comedy Mixed Nuts, which spends a chaotic Christmas Eve with the staff of a Venice Beach crisis helpline. Reviled by critics who’d expected another Sleeping in Seattle from Ephron, it’s salty but moreish.
People discover unexpected connections and alliances in their community, rather than from their families. Yes, its trans politics are 30 years old, and it features a young, ukulele-playing Adam Sandler at his most grating; but compared to The Merry Gentlemen, its treatment of landlords is refreshingly festive.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), the greatest Christmas movie of all time, has one of cinema’s greatest endings. Like elderly miser Ebenezer Scrooge before him, George Bailey (James Stewart) re-examines his life on Christmas Eve via supernatural intervention. But while Scrooge learns to give, not hoard, George realises all his life’s losses have actually enriched his snowy hometown Bedford Falls – the template for thousands of disposable Christmas-movie villages.
Now they crowd into George’s home, and his private sphere becomes a public pageant as everyone chips in to pay the debt that had driven George to despair. As the townsfolk sing, ‘We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,’ George reads a message from his guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers): ‘Remember no man is a failure who has friends.’
If you or people you know are going through a tough time, find your community!
Call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, MensLine Australia on 1300 78 99 78, QLife on 1800 184 527, or 13YARN on 13 92 76.
