Yes, it’s that time of the year…No, not just Jesus’ birthday coinciding with so many nogs coming out of the woodwork (did this happen last year?) but the annual ranking of best Christmas movies. Once finished you’ll notice many not on the list and I’ve left notes for those after as well as the why…But enough of that, let’s get to it.

6. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): Only Tim Burton could create such a timeless, haunting masterpiece. The movie took three years to make. Yes, one week’s worth of stop motion “claymation” photography was enough for one minute of film. That’s one hell of a project. There’s singing, there’s dancing, and the whole shebang revolves around the theme of trying to find fulfillment in life, especially when one has been doing the same damn thing for a long time. The lesson here is

5. Bad Santa (2003): Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic, thieving Santa Claus who befriends a child looking for a father figure. Good stuff.

4. A Christmas Story (1985): I saw this one a bit too early in life and the dry, sarcastic tone still rings through my adult inner monologue.

3. Die Hard (1988): Dubbed “Not a Christmas movie” by Bruce Willis himself yet the theme music throughout is tinged with the same bells Santa utilizes, albeit with a slight darkness. In my youth I remember my best friend’s father watching this ad infinitum and laughing so hard the house shook.

2. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946): The darkest of all and best of all but listed second here because it’s in black and white and a little outdated. Ah, the old days when a man could work one job and own a house, a car, and support his family. Good old George Bailey didn’t know how good he had it. Fast forward nearly 80 years and a man can barely afford to do the same things working two jobs.

1. Christmas Vacation (1989): The seminal Christmas movie in which we see the father who does his best but is continually set upon by the throes of chaos/family and his own bad/dumb choices. My favorite part of course, is when Clark’s rich, cheap ass boss who didn’t give him a Christmas bonus (a familiar theme in my own life) is kidnapped by the outrageous Cousin Eddie (one of the greatest roles in all of film history played by the indomitable Randy Quaid) and the boss is forced into shame by seeing the disappointment and pain he has caused within the family…A scenario which we can all relate to and wish we had the balls to perform but alas this is why film shadows life and is not, actually, reality. You’ve got some great scenes, too many to list, but my favorite is probably any scene with Cousin Eddie.

There needs to be a modern, classic Christmas tale. Hollywood has fallen short on this in the last few decades. Look at the above list, the most recent, Bad Santa was made twenty years ago.

Films with no honorable mention. What’s the opposite? Turd in my martini? Yeah, that works.

Turds in my martini:

Home Alone (all three). What’s more annoying than Macauley Culkin? A young Macauley Culkin. I never liked this string of movies. For some it’s a holiday staple, but for me, I wish the villains had ended up robbing his rich parent’s house and possibly kidnapped and ransomed him off. He was just always some kid I wanted to beat the shit out of. Jealous? Yeah probably.

That’s it really. I don’t hate on much. There’s something about Home Alone that just annoys the crap out of me. Maybe it’s the sheer stupidity of it all, maybe it’s because I loved the old John Hughes movies–Uncle Buck, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club–and the new cutesy stuff doesn’t cut the mustard. With the exception of Christmas Vacation my selections are on the darker side of the spectrum possibly because I’ve never been a big fan of Christmas, of the big capitalist push, the pagan tree, all of it, but because I’m a dad I have to get up for it and now it’s ceased being about me and my disgruntlement and it’s more about giving my son a normal existence full of well wrapped gifts and joy in the form of plastic, materialistic objects he won’t give a shit about in a year’s time. See? I can’t help myself. I just feel there’s such a hypocrisy behind all of it, that my son is very well off and instead of giving him a bunch of toys I should be giving my money to someone who deserves it more. But who? That’s the hard part right? I always said when he was old enough, I would take my son to the homeless shelter on Sundays where we would both volunteer and see life from the other side of the coin to help people with less privilege who were a lot less lucky than we were. Will that still happen? I don’t know. He’s only three. There’s a few more years to go until something like that could materialize. Man oh man, Christmas just isn’t fun for me. It brings up all kinds of bad shit from my past. Nothing extreme, just plain old unhappiness. Now it’s more about me though. But what to teach my kid? That we all celebrate Jesus’ birthday despite not believing in organized religion at all? That most of these religious holidays revolve around this time of the year because of old pagan celebrations which occurred around the solstice? The very middle of the year for which every damn day after would begin to be brighter? That’s a cause I can get around. If anything, that is the true meaning of it. That, and the traffic becomes very light in L.A. this time of the year.