The question is what do people mean by “A Christmas Movie”? One set in the season?
Or one which is about Christmas. To me- those are Christmas Movies. The Santa Clause. Polar Express. Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer. And so forth.
Home Alone is marginal.
But if people want to say a film qualifies if it is set during Christmas- like Die Hard. That’s okay too.
Have you watched Home Alone? It’s not just set during Christmas. It’s about Christmas. Unless your definition requires it to be about Santa, which would exclude movies like Christmas Vacation.
I said it is marginal. It can qualify.
It seems that some people consider Brazil to be a Christmas movie.
To me, a Christmas movie is one in which Christmas is an integral part of the plot. The test is, what would it take to rewrite the movie to remove all references to Christmas? By this criterion, Miracle on 34th Street is obviously a Christmas movie. It would be essentially impossible to rewrite it with no reference to Christmas. Home Alone is borderline. It would take some work, but not a tremendous amount, to have the family vacation be for some other reason and remove all other Christmas references. By contrast, to remove all Christmas references in Die Hard would be trivial. You’d just need to change a very few lines of dialog and remove the decorations from some sets. It would not affect the plot in any significant way at all. It’s not a Christmas move, it’s just a movie which happens to take place near Christmas.
Good points. I agree Home Alone is borderline. Yes, it is a Christmas movies- or No, it is not- either works for me.
How does It’s A Wonderful Life measure up?
Yeah, you could strip out the Santa-and-Christmas-Tree-And-One-Horse-Open-Sleigh opening credits, and the angle where folks are praying on Christmas Eve so an angel will visit a guy who then runs around wishing a Merry Christmas to the people and buildings he runs past in the snow until he arrives home — to find people who then take turns wishing him a Merry Christmas while giving him gifts and singing a Christmas carol — and someone then notes the gift that he got from the angel, which he describes as a Christmas present, and then it ends with him agreeing that a given Christmas-tree ornament isn’t merely decorative but has a spiritual meaning.
But if you remove all of that, how much of a movie is left?
Make it New years. I mean, obviously it is better with Christmas, but it is not about Christmas. It is about the impact that one decent mans life can have,
Speaking as a Jew, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say “so is Christmas.”
You are,
and you make a good point. But I dont think that is the point of the film.
I’m not so confident about the idea that a movie is not a Christmas movie if you can easily strip out all the Christmas references. For example, I think that Christmas in Connecticut is pretty clearly a Christmas movie, yet it would be pretty easy to change it to another holiday or event, or even remove it from a holiday altogether. The plot and gags would still work.
Not all that trivial. The fact that it’s Christmas Eve explains why Nakatomi corp is having a company social event in the tower, why the entire district is otherwise completely deserted, and why McClane has traveled across the country to visit his estranged family. I suppose you could make it Thanksgiving instead, but the fact that it’s the night before a major holiday is a key part of Gruber’s planning.
Oh, yeah! One of my favorite scenes of all time is in that movie! 
Yeah, my problem with the whole “can you strip out Christmas” criteria, is it basically reduces the entire genre to movies about Santa. Everything else you can just say “well, make it another holiday.” Scrooge is about to be visited by the ghosts of Easter Past, Present, and Future.
Or explicitly about the Nativity
I don’t like to think about the Easter Future (shiver!)
I just saw it for the first time. I think it is less a Christmas movie than Die Hard, and I’m on record saying DH isn’t a Christmas movie. There’s nothing Christmassy about CiC. It a story of lies and mistaken identity and an annoying bullying boss and a closeted gay man looking for a beard wife ( ) It doesn’t even really need a holiday at all to work.
He doesn’t even need to be separated, or even estranged, for the film to work.
Now I’m envisioning Die Hard without Christmas like Garfield without words (or Garfield without Garfield).
You’d have to remove the “Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.” scene, which would have destroyed Alan Rickman’s career.
But I do appreciate that your criteria means that “Bad Santa” is solidly a Christmas movie, which a lot of people argue against.
I mean, it could obviously be rewritten to make that work, but Holly and John being estranged is a key plot point throughout the movie.
You could, if you wanted, write a screenplay for a movie much like Die Hard that doesn’t require it to be Christmas, and that omits the Christmas-y tropes of reuniting family etc. At a certain point, however, it’s not quite Die Hard any more.
I guess you could have Nakatomi celebrating some big company coup, like closing a major merger/acquisition or something, to move it to a random date. John and Holly are together, but John shows up late for some random reason. Holly has never taken John’s last name because she’s a modern businesswoman. Still have to do something about McClane being a cop but not an LAPD cop. Could have him working for Anaheim or something, I guess? Really doesn’t work as well as him being NYPD I don’t think.
It’s a similar movie, but I’m not sure it’s actually Die Hard.