Christmas Magic on Screen: A Curated List of Must-Watch Holiday Classics

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Christmas movies hold a special place in the hearts of many, offering a blend of nostalgia, joy and fun that captures the magic of the holiday season. These films create a sense of togetherness, drawing families and friends around the glow of the television. 

James Kendrick, Ph.D., a film historian and professor of film and digital media at Baylor University, has curated a list of his Top 5 Christmas movies, sharing the history of how they became holiday classics sure to fill you with holiday cheer.

1. It’s a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra’s classic is the perennial Christmas movie, which is only fitting given that it began with writer Philip Van Doren Stern penning a short story called “The Greatest Gift” and printing it on 200 holiday cards that he sent to friends and family.

Although initially a box office dud, it later fell into the public domain and was used by PBS stations during the 1970s as December counter-programming, turning it into the holiday classic it always deserved to be. Along with stockings hung by the fireplace, decorated trees, and blinking lights on the house, the viewing of this movie has become indelibly interwoven into contemporary Christmas tradition. 

Capra weaves a rich tapestry of American life on the screen, filling the screen with memorable details and wonderful performances from James Stewart, in his first role after returning from duty in World War II, and Donna Reed, then a largely unknown contract player. It is a truly classic, timeless film, one of the few that quite simply never grows old.

2. Die Hard

It is a long-settled matter that Die Hard is not just a Christmas movie, but one of the very best.  Christmas movies, after all, know no genre, so there is no reason why a violent action film can’t fit the bill for the holidays.

The decision to set John McTiernan’s wry action extravaganza against a Christmas-season backdrop only adds to the film’s myriad pleasures, as it makes Bruce Willis’s one-man mission to eradicate a crack team of terrorist-robbers that has taken a Los Angeles high-rise hostage along with a party of business executives that include his estranged wife all the more imperative. 

“The fact that the soundtrack includes as many jingle bells as gunshots (well, maybe not quite as many, but still more than a few) only adds to the seasonal feels,” said Kendrick. 

3. A Christmas Story

Somewhere inside we are all young, round-faced Ralphie, pining away for our own “official Red Ryder carbine action, 200-shot Range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.” 

The film’s stroke of brilliance in how it ladles halcyon American nostalgia—so many images from the film could have been painted by Norman Rockwell—with a biting sense of cold, but often hilarious, reality.  

Humorist Jean Shepherd, parts of whose 1966 semi-autobiographical short story collection In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash provided the film’s source material, narrates the film with a mix of humor and irony, making each scene work as both an evocation of a specific time and place in American history and a blank slate onto which we can project our own Christmas memories and dreams. 

The fact that the genuine, child wonderment of waking up on Christmas morning co-exists so easily with sneering bullies, creatively cursing fathers, draconian teachers, tongues frozen to light poles, inappropriate major awards, and the always braying Bumpass hounds is testament to the film’s breadth and depth.

4. A Charlie Brown Christmas

The first and best of the Peanuts TV specials (sorry, Great Pumpkin), A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered in 1965 and has been in our hearts ever since. While technically not a feature film, it captures in its brisk 22 minutes both the truth of the Christmas spirit and the attendant interpersonal difficulties of the holiday season. 

The fact that it does so with such good humor and poignancy means that no Christmas viewing list is complete without it. Charlie Brown’s oft-frustrated attempts to fit in and find meaning in the season amid all the crass commercialism is one of pop culture’s greatest evocations of existential struggle, but all the low points are balanced perfectly with Linus’s simple, illuminating recitation of the annunciation to the shepherds from the Book of Luke, which remains remarkably powerful in its unadorned directness. From the mouth of babes, indeed.

5. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

This is the movie for everyone who has ever tried their absolute hardest to live up to the hype of the Christmas season, only to end in abject failure. Maybe we haven’t all crashed and burned as badly as poor Clark Griswold does here, but we can all relate to how the idea of a “good ol’ fashioned family Christmas” doesn’t always comport with the realities of family, especially when your family includes the inveterate Cousin Eddie, who thinks nothing of emptying his rusting hulk of an RV’s chemical toilet into a storm drain first thing in the morning while wearing a shorty robe and smoking a cigar. 

John Hughes’s screenplay is a veritable compendium of modern America’s expectations for the season and how they can all go terribly, horribly wrong, which is enough to make anyone feel better about their own Christmas turkey coming out too dry or inability to find which lightbulb is causing the whole strand to go dark.

ABOUT JAMES KENDRICK, PH.D.

James Kendrick, Ph.D., professor of film and digital media at Baylor University, focuses his primary research interests on post-Classical Hollywood film history, the films of Steven Spielberg, violence in the media, cult and horror films, media censorship and regulation, and cinema and new technologies. He has authored three books: Darkness in the Bliss-Out: A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg; Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in the 1980s American Cinema and Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre. In addition, he is the film and video critic for the website Qnetwork.com, where he has written more than 3,000 feature-length reviews. Kendrick is a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the University Film and Video Association and the Online Film Critics Society.

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked Research 1 institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 20,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions. Learn more about Baylor University at www.baylor.edu. 

ABOUT THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments in the sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, as well as 11 academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. The College’s undergraduate Unified Core Curriculum, which routinely receives top grades in national assessments, emphasizes a liberal education characterized by critical thinking, communication, civic engagement and Christian commitment. Arts & Sciences faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines. Visit the College of Arts & Sciences website.