"The Muppet Christmas Carol," "Elf," and the eternal debate over Christmas movies

©  Disney

When it comes to Christmas movies, a certain amount of negotiation is usually required.

Thanksgiving generally marks the official beginning of Christmas movie season, the first point where people pull out blu-rays of their favorites and holiday specials are capable of popping up anywhere. It also once again renews the question of what the “true” Christmas movies are, a question that can differ dramatically from person to person and from household to household.

Even movies generally thought of as being on the “Greatest Hits of Christmas” list can be up for debate. “It's a Wonderful Life” and "Miracle on 34th Street" are both seen as Christmas classics, but a lot of people I've talked to who love one of the movies have almost zero interest in the other. Then there's the question of the black and white versus the colored versions of the movies, which can get more intense than people not interested in either movie could possibly imagine.

“A Christmas Carol” is an entire argument all on its own. There are enough versions of the movie to fill several different pages of Google, even when you don’t include modern variations, and fans of the story all have their favorites. The dozens of different factors that are involved – animated versus live action, classic retellings versus modern variations, fealty to the original story versus more streamlined retellings – and each argument has its champions on both sides. My personal votes are 1992’s “A Muppet Christmas Carol” for best original version – yes, I know, but the story is actually fairly faithful – and 1988’s “Scrooged” for best modern adaptation.

Then there's a comedy subsection, the most common representatives of which are “A Christmas Story” and “National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.” Technically, both are period movies – “A Christmas Story” intentionally evokes the 1950s, and “Lampoon’s” due to the fact that we’re moving increasing further away from the 1980s – and involve significant amounts of slapstick. Still, it’s nearly impossible to find both movies on a person’s “must see” Christmas list, and that’s not including those people who would happily ignore either for “Home Alone.”

Though it’s also a comedy, “Elf” seems to be in a category all its own. Discussions about holiday movies suggest that there are two very different opinions on the movie – either people love it and watch it every year, or they tried it once and immediately vowed never to watch it again. In case you’re curious, the people in the latter category always look faintly pained at the mere mention of it.

You'd think kids' movies would be considered universally acceptable, but even they have some mortal enemies. My best friend absolutely loathes all Rankin/Bass Christmas movies, particularly the classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Her least favorite character in that movie is the elf who wants to be a dentist, so much so that even a mention of him is enough to inspire a rant. It’s bad enough that she’d rather watch any number of schmaltzy Christmas movies, which she also dislikes, rather than be forced to watch a Rankin/Bass special.

Then, of course, there are wild card favorites. Some people argue that “Die Hard” is the only acceptable movie (it counts – the setting is a Christmas party), and others who consider “Nightmare Before Christmas” to be required viewing for both Halloween and Christmas. There’s even a few people who love “Ernest Saves Christmas,” but most probably won’t admit it in public.

The real answer to the question of the best Christmas movie, however, is surprisingly simple. It’s the one that makes you think of favorite childhood Christmas memories, or the one that makes your child smile. It’s the movie that still makes you laugh, even though you’ve seen it no less than 20 times, or the one that still reliably chokes you up even though you know it well enough to have all the dialogue memorizes. It’s whatever movie makes you not mind the snow outside (if there is snow) and makes you feel like Christmas lights look in the darkness.

So champion your Christmas movie, loud and proud, but don’t knock anyone else’s, either. It means Christmas to them, and that’s what matters. 

Growing up for the kids’ sake

There’s nothing that matures you faster than having to take care of someone smaller than you are.

Because let’s face it, most of us aren’t that great when it comes to taking care of ourselves. We know everything we should do to keep ourselves happy, healthy and relatively functional, but we tend to ignore the bits that we don’t have time for or we feel like are too hard for some reason. It’s even easier to ignore if the problems it causes aren’t immediately apparent, because it’s much harder to worry about 10 or 15 years in the future when you’re focused on making it through a particular day.

But when you have a kid, or become responsible for a kid for some reason, suddenly it’s much harder avoid thinking about all the things you should be doing. Or, more specifically, all the things that someone should be doing for this particular child, who is relatively young and innocent and still feels like they should listen when people tell them what to do. Horrifically, you have somehow become the person who’s supposed to pass on all the advice you’ve been happily ignoring for years.

Which means that you not only have to remember all that advice, but you have to figure out how to sort out the useful information from the random fads that get news sites all excited on slow news days. Because this child hasn’t lived long enough to tell the difference between what’s healthy and what’s complete nonsense, so you have to figure out how to do it for them.

Even though you’ve (probably) been successfully avoiding a Healthy and Responsible Life (tm) for several years, it’s your job to explain to this child how to live that kind of life for themselves. Because you may have opted out, but they’re not old enough to make that choice for themselves yet.

Which means, unfortunately, that it’s your job to choose for them until they can. You have to learn how to watch out for those moments when they’re screwing up, and figure out how to get them back on track. Even more importantly, you need to be on the lookout for dangers they haven’t figured out yet, or you forgot to tell them, and help keep them from falling into them. As a bonus round, you also have to figure out when you need to start letting them make choices on their own so they learn how.

On top of all of that, you have to be a good example, because this kid is going to look up to you. No matter how ridiculous you are, all this child is going to see is a loving and responsible adult in their lives. They’re going to want to pattern themselves after you, often zeroing in on the traits you least wish they would notice and immediately copying them. Which means that, even if you don’t particularly worry about keeping yourself healthy and safe, now is probably a good time to start.

It’s not for you – it’s so your favorite small person doesn’t start making all the terrible decisions you’ve been happily making for most of your life.  

The speed of time, according to humans

Scientists now have a pretty good idea of why time seems to move faster as we get older.

Like with everything else in our lives, it’s all a matter of perception. Specifically, how we perceive a smaller chunk of time – such as a day, month, or year – compared to the whole of our lives. When you’re 16, a year is 1/16th of the entire time we’ve been alive, which feels like an immense chunk of time. When you’re 60, however, it’s only 1/60th of the time you’ve spent alive. Though it’s the same amount of time for both people, the percentages make it feel like a vastly different amount of time by comparison.

Stated another way, a year to a 16 year old feels like 62.5 feet of a 1,000 mile journey, while for 60-year-olds it’s just under 17 feet. To an eight year old, by comparison, it’s 125 feet. In our minds, that translates to the 16-year-old feeling like the year has gone by twice as fast as it did for the eight-year-old, and for the 60-year-old it feels like it’s gone by six times as fast. Each year becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the experiences we’ve racked up, and farther ahead we travel the blurrier our memories become of the miles we traveled when we were just starting out.

On some level, this could be seen as inherently depressing. Personally, my first thought whenever I hear this is all about hourglasses, and the endless metaphors people use of the sand running out and time slipping through our fingers.

But my second thought is always one of absolute relief, because when you have enough of something it means there are always fewer consequences to completely screwing up one of them. One bad year out of 60 is far less obvious than one bad year out of 20, and even if you rack up a couple – as many of us have – they’ll soon get lost enough in the shuffle that they’ll be harder to remember.

And even when you’re going through them, they seem more manageable the more life experience you have under your belt. When you’re young and haven’t done much living, odds are that it will be the first time you’ve run into a particular trauma. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve run into any trauma, which will inevitably make whatever it is seem like the worst thing in the world.

When you’re older, however, your standards for what trauma is and what the “worst thing in the world” is get much higher. You’ve had practice surviving, and solving problems, and even when bad things happen your toolbox for dealing with them is much bigger.

And once they’ve passed, older people have more average and good memories in their heads to help crowd out the bad ones. Even traumatic years become just a few miles of the road we’ve traveled, a relatively small portion of what usually turns out to be a pleasant, rewarding overall journey.  

So don’t feel bad when time slips away faster than it used to. That just means you’ve gone a lot farther than you once had.