Scene 1. Inside. Helen’s house. Helen is a very pretty blonde woman who watches the snow fall from her window, the skating rink and the decorated houses in her neighborhood, but hers is not. He mutters “I hate Christmas” and sighs. Scene 2. Outside. Rink. Mike, a handsome but non-threatening swarthy man with a beard, across the street, she puts on her skates while decorating a Christmas tree. Hand-embroidered reindeer are on her red sweater and she is humming a Christmas carol. He looks at Helen and smiles. The title appears: ‘Christmas kisses’.
The comfort of Christmas movies
You know what’s up. You have seen it before it begins, and you have forgotten it before it ends. Christmas movies attack us everywhere these days, whether you put Netflix, Antena 3 or even Filmin. The girl who hates Christmas and who -it’s already bad luck- lives in Navidalia (Massachussets), the subject with whom the prince of Christmonia falls in love, the cabin in the woods that a whole family will fight to keep thanks to the spirit of these holidays … Clone arguments that give us a strange comfort that can only exist on these dates.
Heating, blanket, hot chocolate, panettone and predictable film that leaves the head as numb as the heart warm. It is very easy to laugh at Christmas movies. So much so that it is not even funny: they themselves are made with the self-awareness that their plot is predictable, the scripts are bought for twenty dollars a pound and actors feel ridiculous for dressing up as Santa Claus in the middle of August (which is, let’s not forget, when they are shot).
But if we look at the evolution of Christmas movies over the decades, there is something whose quality has dropped tremendously (apart from the technical and artistic invoice): Christmas miracles. If in ‘How beautiful it is to live!’ they saved a man from wanting to die and an angel gained his wings, in ‘A Christmas Cabin’ the miracle is that an Illinois couple finds love. The same, the same, it is not.
Miracles of all a hundred
Christmas miracles understood by modern cinema can be divided into four groups: loving (finding a partner), family (reuniting the family), festive (discovering the intrinsic meaning of a Christmas tree) or tangible (saving a cabin in the middle of the woods). They are stupendous things, of course they are, but no matter how hard you look at it, and as much as Santa Claus appears in the middle winking, they are not miracles.
They are always positive things, of course, but they acquire the status of divinity only because they occur during ten very specific days of the year, reducing the cinema of this time to the predictability of knowing that if something goes wrong, it will start to go well on the very 15th of December until reaching its culmination of fir trees, snow, balls and Christmas carols on the 25th. And what’s worse: if a film tries to transgress the norm in any way, it will always end up turning towards what is already known. There can be no action movies without explosions just like there can be no Christmas movies without meeting expectations.
Of course there is a margin of transgression allowed, but normally they have more to do with classical representation than with the plot itself. In ‘Christmas Date’, Hugo and Patrick fall in love and put their relationship to the test; in ‘Under the Christmas tree’ it is Alma and Charlie who fall in love between cookies and mistletoe. This (very, very slight) concession to the LGBT community has been highly celebrated by some and criticized by others. For example, Great American Family, an American Christian channel, decided that in his films of these dates would always maintain the traditional romance. And so it has been. But.
The meaning of Christmas
It is surprising that even movies on an exclusively Christian channel be so white in your celebration. One would expect the Nativity scene, the Baby Jesus or a couple of masses, but really the Great American Family movies are like the Hallmark ones (which, in turn, are like the Netflix ones but a little less sexy): stripping away a “Merry Christmas” beyond the more white “happy holidays” there’s practically no difference between most ribbons.
The curious thing is that Christmas was born from stories where the miracles were amazing: a boy born to a virgin mother and to whom three kings of the Orient bring gifts, a 16th century saint who gave money to girls so they wouldn’t be prostitutes (really, take a look at the birth of Santa Claus)… In comparison, that Helen and Mike meet on Christmas Eve making cookies It is a miracle that lacks a little charisma.
We have the Christmas cinema that we deserve in these times: a superhuman amount of titles of absolutely ridiculous quality in which we can not even believe the chichinabo miracles that they sell us. And the worst part is that, next year, when an actress who has disappeared in action makes ‘Christmas of Love’ we won’t be able to miss it. Returning again and again to this strange comfort with which no spectator is really completely comfortable is the true miracle of Christmas. Now imagine that, to close this article, Santa Claus, who all this time has been the wise and affable baker of the town, winks at the camera. He couldn’t end it any other way.