Book Review: Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, Revised & Updated Edition

Note: A digital copy of this book was provided by the publisher for review.

What really jumped out at me as I read through the new edition of Alonso Duralde's guide to holiday movies (and looked back on the original) was how far ahead of the curve Duralde's been. For those of you unfamiliar with the first edition, "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" is a guide designed to streamline the process of finding holiday movies you may have missed or forgotten about. The original came out fifteen years ago, and it remains pretty much the only book of its kind on the market (or at least the only one I've been able to find... and I've been looking).

I'm not forgetting Jeremy Arnold's "Christmas In The Movies" - that's also quite good, but Arnold's approaching the concept of the holiday movie from a very different, much more focused perspective. What sets "Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas" apart is that it's collecting a wide variety of different movies distinguished by their connection to the holidays. It's accommodating fans of horror, action, drama, and comedy - and in the process communicating that these movies should be counted in the canon of holiday films. This book is effectively the best starting point available for compiling a list of Christmas movies and something I'd think any serious fan of that media would want on their shelf. Casual movie watchers should also find it useful to peruse every December while looking for holiday options they either forgot or never knew about.

If you already have the first edition, you'll likely have the same question I did: how "revised" are we talking here?

The answer is "substantially." I haven't compared the editions page by page, but there are a significant number of new entries here, reflecting the accelerated pace of holiday movies made in the first quarter of this century. Don't hold me to this, but I'd guess around 20% to 25% of the entries are new. Those aren't evenly distributed: most of the entries for kid's movies are new, while I only counted one new addition to the section devoted to adaptations of A Christmas Carol (the 2022 Netflix animated version didn't make it into the new edition, which was somewhat surprising since - for better or worse - it's a remake of Duralde's favorite adaptation). But on the whole, this was heavily revised and rewritten. 

In short, it's worth getting the new edition even if you already own a copy of the original.

The new cover is also an improvement over the original, even more so if you're giving this as a gift (you can skip the wrapping paper: they've taken care of that for you). The new edition supplants the original as the best, most streamlined guide to finding holiday movies. In the process of looking through this version, I added more than thirty movies to my watchlist (including some I never got around to from the first edition). Here's hoping I find time to get to them all before Duralde releases a third edition in 2040.