The Official Ranking of Christmas Films

Christmas movies were always a huge part of my childhood growing up. It was honestly more important that the first snow, the Christmas tree, or cookies.

Every Christmas, I'd stay up watching TNT's 24 hours of A Christmas Story until I knew my parents were in bed, I'd sneak upstairs and start scoping the joint out. How big were the gifts? Who got the most? If I shake this is it obviously LEGOs? At some point, I'd awaken the brothers to partake in the shenanigans. At some point, we'd all go to bed, only to wake up at 5 am, pull the groggy parents from bed, and just about throw up from anticipation while my dad had his first cigarette and coffee and my mom made omelets. 

Some of these may not feel inherently like Christmas movies, but trust me, fire the film up on a cold day, wrap a blanket around you, and lose yourself for a few hours. 

10. Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

The Muppets are magical creatures. These little puppets are able to express emotion in ways that put daytime soap actors to shame.

And Kermit the frog as Bob Cratchit, come on, there's no better casting in the world. 

9. Die Hard (1988) 

Har har har, the internet joke that has been beaten to death. Yes, I do consider Die Hard a Christmas movie. The whole premise is based around a holiday party gone bad. One of the best scenes is when John McClain sends the dead terrorist to the rest of the baddies with the "Now I have a Machine Gun, Ho Ho Ho" message scrawled on his shirt. 

It would be hard to do the same Die Hard with cell phones now, but the expert way the writers were able to explain the isolation John McClain feels is perfect.

8. Four Brothers

They came to bury their mother... and her killers.

I went and saw this in theaters as a sort of joke. Andre 3000 and Marc Wahlberg in a revenge, action film. This is going to be dumb.

Well, there are parts of it that are dumb, but overall this movie is awesome. And it all takes place in the winter in Detroit, so lot's of snow, hockey, and guns. 

7. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Say what? The template for the Christmas movie is only at number 7? Sacrilege.

Well, have you watched it recently? Still a classic, still insanely well acted, but the thing working against It's a Wonder Life is the run time. 2 hours and 10 minutes is too much for this Christmas film. We're not looking for Lord of the Rings, we're looking for snow and a little magic.  

6. The Night Before

I would've never watched this movie if Amazon didn't have it for sale for $2 a couple years ago. A stoner Christmas movie is one of those things where they usually throw a bunch of pop-culture jokes at you. Things that don't make sense after a few years.

What you have is a hilarious take on Christmas traditions with three adult best friends. A Christmas miracle through-line. And honestly, it has one of my favorite church scenes in any movie. Seth Rogen, on a lot of drugs, in church for Christmas mass, having a freak out about being Jewish.

5. Scrooged

Pretty much anything Bill Murray is in, I'll watch. He had this sort of underrated late 80s, early 90s where he did a bunch of comedies that were sort of overshadowed by his previous work in Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, and Stripes.

We rented this from the grocery store at least once a year, but many of my friends had never seen it. It's a fantastic 80s take on the Christmas Carol. 

4. A Christmas Story

Like I said, this was a staple in my house. I'd watch it for 6 hours straight on TNT. I owned it on VHS and would watch it in the summer. We had a freakin' leg lamp in the house for god's sake.

I don't know if another Christmas movie has created so many quotable lines or scenes. Fragiiiiiileeee, the tongue on the pole, the Chinese Christmas dinner, Santa kicking him down the slide, and of course the Red Rider BB Gun.

3. White Christmas

It took two tries to get White Christmas right. The original film, Holiday Inn, didn't quite hit and it's especially tough to get through with ... well... the black face... nowadays.

And then a few years later, Bing Crosby got another chance to release his White Christmas single in a near perfect Christmas movie. It has the perfect sentimentality for a Christmas film. It'll make you cry, laugh, and sing along.

2. Love Actually

On paper, this British film should bomb terribly. It's got too many actors, too many stories, and tries to cram too much love into a movie that culminates on Christmas.

Instead, the movie leaves you feeling uplifted. It's funny, it's sweet, it's raw, and about every 2 years another movie comes out claiming to be the next, "Love Actually."

1. The Family Stone

I went and saw this with a girl I had a huge crush on in high-school because her little sister wanted to see it in theaters. Us being too cool for school, thought we were about to have a new movie we could make fun of with endless inside jokes everyone else would hate.

Instead we both left the theater bawling our eyes out, trying to hide our faces from the other one. 

The Centrist Dilemma

With the knockdown, drag-out Democratic primary ongoing, and rich men throwing their hat in the ring on a late, long shot, vanity campaign, the thing that keeps popping up is electability. And from everything I can read, electability means a centrist candidate who some average white guy from Michigan will vote for.

Well, normally I would say a centrist is probably a good way to go about things. Everyone is mildly disappointed, but overall comfortable. It' that thing called compromise that doesn't seem to have any sort of place in politics anymore.

The problem is, the Republican party (according to data from the Manifesto Project) has at least been moving further right, and since they've largely been in charge of the Legislative and sometimes the Executive branch, it feels like things are moving more right. We've had groups like the Freedom caucus and Tea Party get loud. We've had the mass exodus of many moderate and establishment Republicans.

One of the hopes with the Obama presidency was that we would get more people on board with his progressive ideas. He thought he could reach across the aisle and get Obamacare passed, get socialized programs passed, and move on from a presidency largely defined by 911 and a war in the Middle East. What did the compromise bring him? A half cooked bill, a denied Supreme Court justice who most agree was more than qualified, and hundreds of other filibustered bills. It mostly left people that voted for him disappointed.

I'm likely more left than the current country will ever be ready for. If it were up to me, everyone would get taxed more in order to pay for socialized medicine, higher and lower education, and I'd push a huge infrastructure bill that included re-usable energy, among other climate change policies leading my agenda. Basically, I want the New Deal 2.0. (And maybe along the way we revisit some of these gerrymandered district lines and the Electoral College.)

There's a reason why Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Ilhan Omar speak to my generation. We mostly want to go further left. We want progressive policies. We want to take care of our neighbors, and worry less about taking care of me and my. Frustratingly, most the country wants to go further left, but the current electoral system makes that difficult. It disenfranchises people from going to the polls because, "why does it even matter?"

We graduated, found low paying entry level jobs, and took raps on the knuckle when every think piece from the Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, etc talked about how lazy and entitled we were.

We saw states cut funding for higher education, meaning we took out much larger loans than the generations before us.

We saw entry level job salaries not keep up with the cost of living.

And then we were mocked for living with our parents instead of buying homes. We were chastised for not buying cars. We were lamented for not eating at chain restaurants.

When I was in college, I was condescendingly told, "When you're young, if you aren't liberal, you don't have a heart, when you're older, if you're not conservative, you don't have a brain." Well, I guess my generation must be ridiculously dumb, because it appears we're moving more and more liberal. If we're not trying to move forward and improve things, I don't know what we're doing.

Still I Rise

I never liked poetry, or at least I didn't think I did.

In third grade, I was in a gifted kids program called Reach. I had a teacher who made us memorize Eugene Field's "The Duel" and then she filmed us reciting it.

Beyond the exploitative feel of having a teacher force us to perform one of her favorite poems in front of camera (did my parents even sign a release for this I wonder?), I didn't feel any connection to this poem about a dog chasing a calico cat around.

Then the likes of Shakespeare and Dickinson were force fed to us during the inevitable poetry section in our English class. None of it resonated.

The weird thing is, I was always really good at writing poetry. I tried to convince myself I was writing lyrics, but they were poems cause it turns out I was never very good at playing guitar.

A typical creative writing class had a dreadful cadence that you had to get over quickly if you wanted to last. It requires thick skin and an ability to take advice and adjust.

You would pour your heart and soul into a Word doc, send it to a teacher, who would print 30 copies, and then you'd spend a class having everyone criticize it. Usually I'd see about a forth of the class drop in the first few weeks.

In my first creative writing college level class, I didn't hear anything good or bad about any of my work. I thought it was kind of weird that none of my poems or short stories ever popped up to be ran through the gauntlet. I just sort of assumed it's because they weren't bad, but probably not great either. The teacher was worried about not having enough material to fill a class.

Then one day, late in the semester, the teacher announced we were going to have a different sort of day.

She had been collecting all of my poems for the entire semester because she thought my works stood out. She thought I had something to say beyond the mere assignment she had given us.

We spent the entire hour going over my poems. Yes, there were some criticisms, but overall it was positive. This honestly might have been one of my top five all time days.

I say this because it's one of the first pieces of positive reinforcement that justified what I had been scribbling in torn notebooks for years. It was the first time the feedback wasn't coming from someone I knew that I couldn't shrug off and say, "Ahhh, they have to say that cuase we're related."

It was after this class that I started seeking out poetry that actually spoke to me. Strangely enough it wasn't the classics like Robert Frost, it was either musicians or black artists.

James Baldwin's "Amen", Langston Hughes "I, Too", and Dudley Randall's "Booker T and W.E.B."

But the poem that spoke to me the most was Maya Angelo's "Still I Rise." I was first introduced to this poem by a musician named Ben Harper, who modified the poem a little to fit lyrics in one of his songs.

There's something about these poems that speak to me. The world is trying to keep these people down, but they're too damn stubborn and revolutionary to stay down. They are inspiring works, ones that I cannot ever fully understand because I did not live the black experience in America, but ones that have a universal knowing in the human struggle.