The Christmas Movies Worth Watching Again Every December

It's 7:40 on a December Tuesday. The tree's on, the popcorn's in the bowl, and you've just burned eighteen minutes scrolling four apps while a nine-year-old asks every ninety seconds if you've picked yet. Nobody picks. Somebody puts on a phone. The night's gone.

Fix it in November. Write nine titles on an index card, tape it inside the cabinet door under the TV, and watch them in order. That's the whole system. What follows is the card I'd hand you, with runtimes, so you can match the movie to the night you actually have.

The anchor goes on Christmas Eve

It's a Wonderful Life (1946, about 130 minutes, not rated). NBC still runs it most years, and it's on disc for six bucks in a bin at any big-box store in December.

Say the annoying part out loud: the first forty-five minutes are setup, and kids under ten will squirm through all of it. The payoff only works because of that setup, so you can't trim it. Put it on late, with the older kids, after the little ones are down.

Content notes, plainly: Mr. Gower strikes George hard across a wounded ear and draws blood. George gets drunk, wrecks a car, and stands on a bridge intending to jump. The Pottersville sequence is bleak on purpose. A bar fight, a slap, a father collapsing.

It's a movie about a man who never got to leave town and saved it anyway. If that doesn't hit you at thirty-eight with a mortgage, check your pulse.

Two half-hours that do more work than most features

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965, about 25 minutes). Linus walks to center stage, asks for lights, and recites Luke 2 from memory. The network wanted it cut. Schulz wouldn't. Sixty years later it's still the plainest statement of what the day is that American television has ever broadcast, and Vince Guaraldi's piano is the reason your kids will hum it in July.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966, about 26 minutes). Chuck Jones animated it, Boris Karloff narrates, Thurl Ravenscroft sings the mean song. Twenty-six minutes. No content concerns beyond a dog in a sad hat.

Short runtimes are a feature, not a compromise. A school night has forty minutes in it, not two hours, and a forty-minute tradition that actually happens beats a two-hour one that keeps getting postponed.

For the little ones, and the adults who pretend they're watching for the little ones

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992, G, about 85 minutes). Michael Caine made one decision that carries the whole film: he plays Scrooge completely straight, as if the frogs aren't there. It's the most faithful Dickens adaptation on film, dialog included, and it's funny.

Content notes: Marley's ghosts are chained and loud, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is genuinely frightening for a four-year-old. Not a little spooky. Frightening. Know your kid. Look for the version that includes the song "When Love Is Gone," which was cut from theaters and restored later. It's the hinge of the whole story.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964, about 47 minutes). The stop-motion still looks better than most of what came after it. Worth a conversation afterward: notice that the adults behave worse than the kids. Santa's short with Rudolph. Donner's ashamed of his own son. Nobody in that film gets a pass for it, which is more moral clarity than a lot of modern children's television manages.

The Technicolor block for a Sunday afternoon

White Christmas (1954, about 120 minutes). Irving Berlin's songbook, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, and a plot about two soldiers who find their old commanding general running a failing Vermont inn and quietly move heaven and earth to fill his dining room. Essentially clean. There's a comic bit where the two men clown their way through a number written for the sisters, in costume, for laughs. That's the extent of it.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947, about 96 minutes). Kris Kringle on trial, a mother who's trained her daughter out of believing anything she can't verify, and a closing argument built on the U.S. Post Office. Content: the parade Santa is drunk in the opening scene and gets fired for it, and the mother is divorced, which the film treats as a wound rather than a lifestyle.

The Bishop's Wife (1947, about 109 minutes). The sleeper of the three. David Niven is a bishop so consumed with raising money for a cathedral that he's lost his marriage, his parish and his prayer life. Cary Grant is the angel sent to fix it, and the fix isn't the cathedral. Watch it with your wife after the kids go up. The sermon at the end is worth writing down.

The deep cut nobody in your house has seen

Remember the Night (1940, about 94 minutes). Preston Sturges wrote it. Barbara Stanwyck is a shoplifter, Fred MacMurray is the prosecutor who gets her trial postponed until after the holidays and then, through a chain of events he half-engineers, drives her home to his mother's farm in Indiana for Christmas.

There's a scene where Stanwyck's character visits her own mother on the way. It's about four minutes long and it will knock the wind out of you. Content: crime, a night in jail, a barn fire, and that scene.

Put it on when somebody says there's nothing left to watch.

The loud ones

Home Alone (1990, PG, about 103 minutes). The slapstick in the last act is cartoon violence your seven-year-old will absolutely try on his brother with a Nerf gun. There's mild language, a couple of crude gags from the older siblings, and the basement furnace is scary for the youngest. Also: the scene in the church with Old Man Marley is the actual point of the movie, and the burglars are the garnish. Skip the sequels. They're photocopies.

Elf (2003, PG, about 97 minutes). Will Ferrell commits like a man with no exit plan. Content: bathroom humor, a shower gag played strictly for laughs with nothing shown, some mild language, and a running joke about a man who may or may not be an elf that gets physical. Fine for most eight-year-olds.

After the kids are in bed

Die Hard (1988, R, about 132 minutes). Label it honestly: heavy profanity throughout, sustained and bloody violence, and brief nudity early in the film. It's not a family movie and it isn't close. It's a Christmas movie, and anybody who says otherwise hasn't reckoned with the fact that the entire plot is a man flying across the country to win back his wife at her office Christmas party.

If that's not your speed, Scrooge (1951, about 86 minutes) with Alastair Sim is the adult Carol. Darker than the Muppets by several shades, better acted than any version since, and Sim's morning-after scene is the best two minutes in any Dickens adaptation ever filmed.

One more, for your own information: Holiday Inn (1942) is where "White Christmas" was introduced, and it contains a blackface musical number. Know that before you put it on with company and have to explain it cold.

Keep the card from going stale

Retire one title a year and add one. Don't watch the anchor twice in a season. And don't let anyone talk you into a new streaming release just because the thumbnail is red and green.

Your kid will be thirty-four someday, in an apartment you've never seen, having a bad year. He'll put on the Muppets in the second week of December because that's what December sounds like. And he'll know, a half-second before it happens, exactly which line his dad always said out loud.