The last holiday movie I plan on writing about this year is Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. And while I support being inclusive of all holidays and not assuming everyone celebrates Christmas—heck, we don’t celebrate a Christian Christmas, so much as we like the music and decorations and trappings, and like being nice to people—I’ve made no secret that these blogs are very much about Christmas things. And I’m not replacing Christmas with “holidays,” because all the things I have picked are very definitely about Christmas. Well, all of them except this one, because this truly is a holiday (or holidays) movie.
My favorite holidays are the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas corridor. I like the dark moodiness of Halloween, plus candy. I like the cozy autumness of Thanksgiving, plus turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and sweet potatoes and pies and EATING. I like lighting the Hanukkah candles and celebrating that part of my heritage. And I like decorating the Christmas tree and exchanging presents with my wife and family and listening to Christmas music and watching Christmas TV shows and movies and reading books and comics and all the holiday eating. So a movie connecting Halloween and Christmas was always going to be right up my alley.
Modern folklore about this movie tells us that it wasn’t a success initially in the theaters, but through home video found an audience and is now considered a holiday classic, blah blah blah. Whatever. I saw it in the theater when it was released, and on my first trip to Walt Disney World, I saw a display of the puppets and sets from the movie. I’ve always been a fan, so my love for this movie is legit. I loved it back when the Disney Store only had one shelf of Nightmare merchandise, hidden back in the corner.
While it ends after Halloween, it is as much a Halloween movie as it is a Christmas movie, because it’s about the folks of Halloween Town trying to force their Halloween ways into a Christmas mold. Seeing people who only know gruesome and scary, and trying to use those skills to make Christmas presents, is hilarious. The songs are great, and the stop-motion animation echoes the classic Rankin-Bass holiday specials while creating an entirely different tone.
Like so many of the other movies I’ve chosen, this movie demonstrates the juxtaposition between the surface trappings of Christmas—the decorations, the presents, the insistence on making people say, “Merry Christmas” instead of being a nice person—over the true spirit of the holiday. Maybe that’s why it’s a favorite; we also focus on the modern commercial trappings of Christmas rather than its religious roots. (Considering that Christmas has a pretty solid background of taking things from other religions and slapping the Christian label on them, that is okay, as far as I’m concerned.) So I guess it makes sense that I’d gravitate more towards movies that eschew the religious stuff in favor of the things we actually include in our own household Christmas traditions.
And that’s it for this year. See you next year (and tomorrow) with Day Eight!!
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