It’s been considered time and time again. This narrative, which continues to reverberate across our social fabric, seems to be resuscitated every holiday season. The discussion (or controversy, depending on who you ask,) is the severe deficit of alternative holiday movies.
In order to define an “alternative” holiday movie, I present you with an analogy which most have experienced.
It’s mid to late December, invariably the peak-season for Chris Cringle and mistletoe. You get home from a long day of holiday shopping, begin to gorge yourself on holiday cookies, and power-on the television. I am willing to bet that the subject of your entertainment, albeit holiday related, revolves around a jovial, autonomous snowman which has the keen ability of self-resurrection, a nihilistic creature that preys upon a sleepy town until an internal revelation, or a reindeer pariah which overcomes his self-consciousness through an evolutionary adaptation which was originally misconceived as a disfigurement.
Although painfully dissimilar, this odd bag of varying settings and characters, is knitted together with a common thread– Christmas. This apparent abundance of Christmas classics evokes a provocative question: Where are the other holiday movies?
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2008, 93% of Americans celebrate Christmas. That means that seven percent or over 22 million Americans do not celebrate the holiday. To place this in perspective, that’s almost the same percentage of Americans who are currently under 5 years of age, according the US Census Bureau.
It is almost unthinkable to neglect a young child the magic of Christmas, so why is there a sizeable population of individuals deprived of their source of holiday cheer in the form of entertainment? There are very few movies about Chanukah appearing on TV and zero Kwanza movies for people to view, yet there are over 50 Christmas movies that air from Thanksgiving through December 25th each year. In relation to other holidays, Christmas by far has the most movies centered around it.
Currently, there is a laughable amount of holiday movies that aren’t Christmas movies, whereas the movie industry is inundated with a myriad of Christmas-themed movies every season. So this is my idea. Apart from all the statistics and conjecture, I actually have a pretty simple message: Film industry– make a movie that isn’t necessarily Christmas themed. A cameo from Chanukah or Kwanzaa wouldn’t hurt, either.
