12.24.18

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, we wish you all the joy and magic of a happy Christmas Eve!

Like many, I have a few niggling tasks to take care of today. And like most, said niggling tasks have a hard deadline: whenever the stores close tonight.

• Buy one tiny last thing for nephew
• Grocery shop for Christmas Eve snacks and Christmas morning, well, snacks

Also, and available after business hours:

• Wrap presents

Kevin is one of the people whose work doesn’t observe Christmas Eve so he’s at his office now. When he gets home, we’re going to go out and see Aquaman then we’ll come home and get ready to go to church. After church, we’ll come back here, get into our Christmas pajamas to eat snacks and do some Christmas Eve crafts. Normally we play a board game and/or Christmas movie – and we may still do both – but, we’ve been so busy that we haven’t been able to tackle the gingerbread men and the blank canvases that we’d planned to decorate for the holidays.

I’m excited for the arrival of Christmas tomorrow and I also can’t believe it’s here. Before bed last night, we were talking about how even in spite of how early we started with our lights and our shopping and our tree, and in spite of how much effort we put into savouring the spirit of the season, it still went by so fast.

One of the things we did early and often this year was watch Christmas movies.

Back in 2015, I spent some time canvassing friends on which were their favourite holiday movies. I wrote about it here and I’ve referred back to the list every year since then.

This year, we tried some new movies – some I had never heard of, some that were outside of my usual holiday preference, some that are considered classics, but that I had missed all these years. Here’s the list we conquered in 2018 (I’m the first emoji, Kevin is the second):

1. The Holiday ????????????????
2. Love Actually ????????????????
3. Krampus ????????????????
4. Four Christmases ????????????????
5. The Family Stone ????????????????
6. Fred Claus ????????????????
7. Bad Santa – DNF ????????????????
8. The Nightmare Before Christmas – DNF ????????????????
9. A Christmas Story ????????????
10. Operation Christmas ????????????
11. A Bad Moms Christmas ????????????????
12. Office Christmas Party ????????????????
13. Christmas Chronicles ????????????????
14. The Muppet Christmas Carol ????????????????
15. Ernest Saves Christmas ????????????????

Notes: We don’t like musicals so that ruled The Nightmare Before Christmas out from the get go. And Bad Santa was awful. Operation Christmas was the only Hallmark-esque movie we watched and it was fine but that isn’t my genre. Krampus: non-traditional (horror) but we had so much fun watching it. Christmas Chronicles. Sigh. I know I’ll be the only one to say this, but it was perfectly okay. Not great. Not best ever. It was fine. Ernest Saves Christmas (basically the exact same story as Chronicles) was the movie that Kevin used to been shown at school and thirty years later, it was a fun piece of nostalgia. A Christmas Story was the movie I used to be shown in elementary school. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now, but, again, nostalgia. We had to settle for The Muppets Christmas Carol as our only Muppets movie this year. Muppets: Letters to Santa. Is my absolute favourite, but we couldn’t find a stream for it and we discovered that we don’t have a DVD player in the house. Who knew?!

Fred Claus was a movie I’d never even heard of, but I love Vince Vaughn on his own and I loved him as Santa’s lesser known brother, too. I was even more surprised to discover Four Christmases, starting not only VV, but also Reese Witherspoon. Sure, it isn’t overflowing with gushy, romantic or familial love, but I like its modern tone and its look at what it’s probably like for people rushing from one family to another to another and another over the holidays. Phew! Talk about making one feel thankful for the situation they’ve got! Lesley found this one too stressful and actually texted me to find out what happened in the end.

Speaking of stressful, The Family Stone was complicated and messy and I almost had to look away during some of the scenes because I just couldn’t stomach the awkwardness between Sarah Jessica Parker and her future in-laws. It was hard to watch, but I loved it in the end.

We watched A Bad Moms Christmas and Office Christmas Party while we were in San Antonio and both made us laugh and laugh and laugh.

The Holiday and Love Actually are staples for the Christmas season in our house and both left is marvelling at how heartwarming they are.

You may have noticed that we didn’t get around to Elf this year, nor did we see or hear any mention of any Grinch. We started strong, but our schedules interfered as time went on. Such is life, I suppose.

What are you doing this Christmas Eve? If you were to pick just one holiday movie to be your favourite, which would it be?