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. She mutters “I hate Christmas” and sighs.
Scene 2. Outside. Rink. Mike, a handsome but non-threatening swarthy man with a beard, across the street, puts on his skates while he decorates a Christmas tree. On his red sweater are hand-embroidered reindeer and he 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 an entire family will fight to preserve 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 movie that leaves the head as numb as the warm heart. It is very easy to laugh at Christmas movies. So much so that it’s not even funny: they themselves are made with the self-aware that their plot is predictable, the scripts are bought for twenty dollars a pound and the 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 won his wings, in ‘A Christmas Cabin’ the miracle is that a couple from Illinois 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 forest). They are stupendous things, of course they are, but no matter how hard you look, and no matter how much 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 right on the 15th of April. December until reaching its peak 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 as there can be no Christmas movies without meeting expectations.
Of course there is a margin of transgression allowed, but usually they have to do more with the 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 their movies on these dates they would always maintain the traditional romance. And so it has been. But.
The meaning of Christmas
It is surprising that even the movies on an exclusively Christian channel are so white in their celebration. One would expect the Nativity scene, the Nino 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): minus a “Happy Christmas” beyond the whiter “Happy Holidays” there is practically no difference between most ribbons.
The funny thing is that Christmas was born from stories where miracles were incredible : a child born to a virgin mother and to whom three kings from the East bring gifts, a 16th century saint who gave money to girls so they wouldn’t be prostitutes (really (check out the birth of Santa Claus)… Helen and Mike meeting on Christmas Eve making cookies by comparison is a miracle that lacks a little charisma.
We have the Christmas cinema that we deserve in these times: a superhuman number of titles of an absolutely ridiculous quality in which we can’t even believe the miracles of chichinabo that they sell us. And the worst part is that, next year, when an actress who disappeared in action makes ‘Love’s Christmas’ 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.