Yippi Ki Yay, Father Christmas: The Essential Christmas Guide Part 1

Despite the fact that ‘tis the season to be jolly, getting the most out of the festive period is no joke. And when it comes to Christmas films, you can’t mess about.

There’s a great many films that are essential viewing over the Christmas period, and it’s important to stick with a tight schedule if you want to get them all done. It takes years of practice to perfect the Christmas movie routine, and this guide should help to guide you in the right direction. This is serious business.

First and foremost, it’s important to get the festive films done in the right order. You can’t just charge in there with Gremlins straight off. Oh no. You need to earn it, to work at it. After all, if you blow your load with NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION early on, what’s left come Christmas Eve? That one that’s always on TV with Fred Savage befriending a tramp? I don’t think so….

First week of December – okay, this may seem a little early to some of you. It’s about this time that your Mums are moaning that the Christmas music has already started in the supermarkets, or that piles of crackers are materialising in the post office – it gets earlier every year, Doris – but there’s a awful lot to get through, so you’ll need to get going at the first opportunity. For those of you tempted to cheat and start in November – don’t. That’s just madness. We’re not animals, after all.

The trick with the first week is to not go over the top. Sure, we want to celebrate the fact that the holidays are coming, holidays are coming, but not too much. Let’s not go overboard. For the first week of December you want to start with a bang, but not one so big you won’t recover from it and spoil the festive viewing for yourself.

The obvious choice is DIE HARD. It’s Christmassy, but not too Christmassy. This should be just about the right balance – besides, who can resist the charms of Bruce Willis in a vest at any time of the year.

This is also a good week to think about television Christmas specials. Let us not forget, a major part of the festive experience is the anticipation of our favourite shows – especially comedy – going all out for a big Christmas themed hour special.

Appropriate for this week would be a number of Only Fools and Horses or One Foot in the Grave episodes. Both have a number of Christmas episodes that will do nicely. Recommended for this week are the first Only Fools and Horses special ‘Christmas Crackers’ and One Foot in the Grave’s ‘Stardust’. It’s also worth looking through the rest of the back catalogue for other specials to screen this week, but be warned, some specials have absolutely nothing to Christmas whatsoever, and we haven’t got time to this sort of thing. Time is crucial, and we’ve only got twenty-five days to get through everything.

On the other hand, and for this week only, it is acceptable to view certain films that are not Christmas based but have that festive feel. The reason for this being that movies are able to inspire that Christmas magic in way non-festive TV can’t. This is largely due to the scheduling of Christmas films on television – one of the most exciting parts of Christmas for a kid is the anticipation of what films will be screened over the period, and as such, the ones we remember from our childhood can be associated with the joy of Noel.

Films such as RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, LABYRINTH, HOOK, BIG, TRON, THE GOONIES, BIGFOOT AND THE HENDERSONS or RETURN OF THE JEDI (and only Jedi – STAR WARS was seldom on the box at Christmas and Empire is hardly appropriate for the festive spirit). Of course, this is a subjective thing and your choices here will very much depend on personal tastes, age, or such the like. For this week, you are permitted to choose a few of your own liking, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the important stuff.

This is also a good time to crack into yuletide gore fests such as SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT and BLACK CHRISTMAS – a little bit of bloodletting in the name of Christmas feels appropriate at this point in the month, especially if we’re already cheering John McClane for chucking poor Hans Gruber off the top of the Nakatomi Plaza.

Something else worth bearing in mind is the yuletide music video. Though the tradition of the Christmas song is not what it once was, it remains an integral part of the Christmas experience. And in the YouTube age we have access to pretty much anything and everything, so it’s worth compiling a list of Christmas music videos to watch at random points over this and the remaining weeks leading into the big day. It may even be a good idea to queue them up and have them playing whilst you put the decorations up.

A few recommendations are – ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)’ by the Darkness, if only for the sight of Justin Hawkins’s trousers (if you can call them trousers); ‘Another Rock N Roll Christmas’ by Gary Glitter, an understandable but unfortunate loss to the Christmas canon (check out Gary holding a guitar but not playing a single note on it, presumably because he doesn’t know how); and, of course, ‘Little Drummer Boy’ by Bing Crosby and David Bowie – the idea that Bowie should happen to knock on Crosby’s door and engage him in some proper Christmas singing is nothing short of hilarious (more on Bowie’s contribution to Christmas next week).

So there we have it, the outline for the first week of Christmas viewing. Over the next two weeks we’ll look at amping up the festive spirit as Christmas Day fast approaches. There are some absolute crackers to get through, and hopefully, with the help of this guide, you’ll be able to do it properly, wringing every last drop of festive cheer out the season.

Remember – above all else – get stuck in with DIE HARD and enjoy the start of the Christmas season. But not too much….