Where We Are Now and How We Got Here

Welcome to year fourteen of Mainlining Christmas. That's right - fourteen years. We've been doing this so long, when we started this blog having a blog didn't seem antiquated. Hell, in 2010 the weird part of this was approaching Christmas as a sort of nerd fandom; now that's kind of normal. For what it's worth, I'm not at all surprised to see an interest in secular yuletide media going mainstream: I'd been expecting that long before we started this.

Over the years, this site has shifted and evolved. Originally, we kind of approached it as a tongue-in-cheek look at Christmas media. We focused on consuming as many movies, shows, specials, songs, and anything else related to the holidays we could get our hands on. Reviews, to the limited extent the term even applies, were little more than warnings or recommendations prefaced with vague descriptions.

Part of me feels embarrassed looking back at earlier write-ups, though I'm probably being a little too hard on myself. It was pretty clear we weren't taking any of this all that seriously, so it's not as if we were betraying some sort of imagined promise. Even so, those reviews, for the most part, don't have a lot of value to anyone, not even us.

This isn't a new realization. Within a handful of years, we found ourselves turning to our own reviews for details on half-forgotten movies (an inevitable side-effect of watching so much so fast) and discovered they weren't much help. That's why we began including plot synopses as a default in our reviews. As time went on, we were less interested in individual pieces of media and more interested in the trends. If we couldn't use our write-ups as notes in tracking those, what good were they?

As time has gone on, our write-ups have grown more and more complex. We've been spending more time exploring themes and - now that we've actually got enough background in all this to know what we're talking about - context within the larger tradition of Christmas entertainment.

For a while now, I've viewed our mission as having somewhat changed, and - before kicking off another season - I thought it might be worth spelling out. We're looking at the way media (mostly movies, though not exclusively) through the prism of how it uses the Christmas holidays (note that plural) tonally and thematically, and how that use has changed over time. There's a secret history to Christmas media, and we want to explore it.

That does shift our focus a bit. While we'll still be looking at the occasional new movie or special, the bulk of what you're going to see this year will be older works. Much older, in fact. As in, we'll be running reviews of quite literally every silent holiday film we were able to get our hands on, as well as numerous films from the 1930s.

We're also going to be posting reviews of a few films that aren't Christmas movies, at least not by any definition we've endorsed. In some cases, we'll be talking about movies containing Christmas sequences that don't amount to a significant portion of the overall screentime or reflect the film's themes in ways that are essential. That doesn't mean we're not going to be selective - rather, there are examples we've encountered where the use of the holidays was either important to how subsequent movies depicted them, or where their presence provides insights into how other cultures view Christmas. Again, our larger goal at this point is to understand the broader subject of Christmas media.

To that end, we'll be publishing a review of at least one work I previously held up as an example of something we'd never cover here. In fact, we'll be publishing reviews of four separate feature-length adaptations of that work. Consider that a teaser.

Again, none of that means there won't be reviews of new specials and the like; just that we're trying to build something a little larger here than a collection of holiday posts.

I also want to warn that we probably won't be publishing quite as often this year. In the past we've generally aimed for three a day at a minimum (excluding a year or two when that was completely out of the question). I expect we'll come close to that this year, but as we've shifted from prioritizing quantity to quality... well... it turns out quality takes time. Who knew? On top of that, our limited free time has been strained by other interests this year (it doesn't help that the bastards at Nintendo released a Zelda game). Also, part of understanding context has meant watching a number of classic movies that have nothing to do with Christmas, just to get a better sense of how holiday movies of the same eras are similar or different (though I did stumble across a couple unexpected holiday gems watching movies at random - there's another teaser for you).

To be honest, I'm not sure what all this is building towards, but I do feel like it's going somewhere. As I said earlier, this stuff has a real history that hasn't really been fully explored (or if it has, I haven't found that exploration). The longer I spend on all this, the more I want to understand what that history is, why this subset of movies developed the tropes they contain, and various subgenres of holiday films evolved as they did.

If all that sounds boring as hell to you, I get it. I probably wouldn't have been as interested in that endeavor fourteen years ago. But now it fascinates me. If it sounds interesting to you, feel free to follow along - for better or worse, we've got a lot to talk about.