The Closing of the Year. Sort of.

Christmas Day is upon us once again, so it's time to wrap things up for another year. Well... sort of. See, despite some concerns about whether we'd have enough to keep up with our usual schedule this year, we're actually finishing with a handful of reviews we never got around to scheduling. While we relaxed our rules on limiting posts to media we deemed "Christmas movies" to include films of historical significance or movies that uses the holidays in interesting ways, we held off on a couple that are really movies where Christmas plays a minor role, and post-Christmas seems like a good time to run those.

I also want to leave open the possibility we might start posting reviews during the off-season (hopefully shorter than most of what we've been doing) of other movies that fall more in the neighborhood of "movies with some scenes during the holidays" than bona fide "Christmas movies." As I said in my intro piece, this blog has piqued my interest around the ways the holidays exist in movies, and that subject extends beyond the limited borders we've drawn for ourselves here. At the same time, I feel like the holiday season itself is better suited to more obviously festive fare.

I'm not sure whether we'll actually do that, but - hey - keep your eyes open in case we get motivated over the next several months. Needless to say, we wouldn't be posting on any kind of schedule (and said posts would be infrequent), but you just might hear more from us between January and November than you have over the past several years.

Setting all that aside, I should probably take a few moments to reflect on what we reviewed this year. Our primary theme wound up being early holiday movies, as we more or less covered the first four decades of film. There are, naturally, a handful of movies from the 1930s we didn't get to and God knows how many more we don't even know about, but overall we crossed off what was probably our largest blind spot in the history of holiday movies.

I'd intended to post some articles on all that encompassing what I'd learned doing all that. I still plan to at some point, though honestly, I think I need some more time to digest what I've been watching. I will say that the experience has reinforced my conviction that the use of the holidays largely changed over World War II, shifting from a Dickensian embrace of charity and a symbol of progressive growth into more regressive themes of nostalgia and a fixation on rural America that still exists to this day. I've written at length about this in various reviews, but at some point, I'll want to pull together my thoughts into something less disjointed.

But of course, our holiday viewing didn't cut off with the end of the '30s. Thanks to our Criterion subscription, we discovered numerous holiday noir films, most of which we never knew existed. I find myself curious what else is out there floating under the radar of Christmas movie lists.

And then there are the horror movies we watched. I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed several of these - this isn't a genre I've typically loved. Either my tastes are changing or I just lucked out as far as the movies I selected.

What's all that mean for next Christmas? Honestly, I have no idea. I feel like I need to revisit quite a few movies from the '40s and '50s we reviewed in the early days of the blog, now that we've got more context for both holiday movies and the medium in general. I expect that'll be something we'll circle around to next year, though it's equally possible we'll find ourselves falling down other rabbit holes into corners of Christmas media we never knew existed.