I only have a handful:
Christmas:
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- Elf (sometimes, I’m not a huge fan)
Thanksgiving:
- Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
I think that’s about it.
mmm
- About every other St Patty’s Day I watch The Quiet Man.
- July 4 I often watch Jaws or 1776.
- Christmas often has Miracle on 34th St, Die Hard, Fitzwilly, It’s a Wonderful Life, Bishop’s Wife.
- Halloween every other year it is Arsenic and Old Lace.
- Groundhog Day is Groundhog Day as it is always good to watch Groundhog Day so might as well watch Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day.
- Memorial Day Weekend: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far or Patton come up fairly often. Or maybe just any old John Wayne WWII movie. Oh, also The African Queen or Casablanca.
- When the kids were young, Easter = Wizard of Oz.
Yeah, we do Elf around Christmas when everyone is home. I also look for a rainy/stormy weekend around Thxgiving thru New Years that I’ll spend inside to watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy. My wife has started the same thing around the same time with the Harry Potter series, altho that does take several weekends.
These are two of mine as well.
Nat Lamp’s Xmas Vaca is Mrs. Solost’s favorite Christmas watch. I like all the Vaca movies too. Even the Vegas one I think is underrated. So we watch NLCV together every year.
As for IAWL, Mrs. Solost sometimes watches with me, but she can take or leave it. I try to catch it every year, sometimes as a late night Xmas Eve watch on my own, because a girlfriend in my 20s loved the movie and made me watch it with her every year. At the time I hated the movie and would whine “do we have to watch it agaaaain?!?” I thought it was the glurgiest, most saccharine movie ever. “Oooh, saved by an angel! How literally deux ex machina!” (yeah, I was kind of an ass in my 20s).
But in the years since, I’ve really developed an appreciation for the movie. There’s some real darkness to the way George’s frustration and anger built up over time comes out when it looks like trouble is closing in on him.
The way Clarence shows George how the world would be different if he never existed is actually kind of deep (at least for the time). All the ripples in existence we make that affect others, and others as well, on and on. George was not there to save his brother as a kid, so his brother was not there to save the troop ship, and hundreds of soldiers died. What good did those soldiers do after the war that wouldn’t happen now? How many children would not be born? And Clarence did not really ‘save’ George, at least not from his legal and financial troubles, he simply gave George a new perspective. Those other troubles were solved because of the good karma George himself had built up.
Christmas must sees are Scrooge with Alastair Sim and A Christmas Story. Although I love them, I have seen IAWL and *White Christmas *too many times. I may peek in on Meet Me in St Louis and Vacation
Memorial Day is The Longest Day. Fourth of July is Yankee Doodle Dandy
I am 66 and have seen each of these movies at least 20 times.
Labor Day: Married…with Children S04E01 (Hot Off the Grill)
Thanksgiving: Planes, Trains and Automobiles*
Halloween: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown*
Christmas: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square Christmas Concert
My folks do It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and “Christmas Carol” (George C. Scott version) every year.
The weekend before Christmas I watch Bad Santa with whiskey & some sandwiches.
Christmas means the Sims version of “A Christmas Carol” though I sometimes add other versions as well. I still have never watched “A Christmas Story”, though I have seen plenty of bits of it since our kids watched it often.
I also look for “The Longest Day” around Memorial Day or D Day. What a cast, though I could have done without John Wayne.
Some Easters but not every one it’s “The Ten Commandments”.
Oh, I forgot about that one. I’m sorta lukewarm on it, but I see it in bits and pieces every holiday season.
In fact, bits and pieces is the only way I’ve ever seen it. I have never watched it from beginning to end, but I bet I’ve “seen” this movie 30+ times.
mmm
That is the only holiday movie I watch each year. It was a tradition of my gf’s dad, so we’d watch it with him each year. He’s gone now, so we still watch it and laugh at what he would always laugh about.
It’s not Christmas without watching Die Hard. We also watch A Holiday Affair because the actor who played the young boy in the film is a friend of ours.
I usually watch Scrooged around Christmastime, and it never gets old (“I’m sorry, I thought you were Richard Pryor.”) Used to screen The Ref a lot, but Spacey kind of soured that, though I still think it’s a brilliant movie. I don’t make a point of popping on the Die Hard BluRay every year, but if it’s on TV, I’ll watch 'til the end.
Guess I’m in the minority…I’ve never thought Christmas Vacation was more than fitfully funny, and I don’t get the love for it beyond what I assume is the “I watched it when I was a kid hence I love it” philosophy. And while I loved A Christmas Story as a kid, I cringe so hard at over-acting as an adult that much of the movie makes my skin crawl now, though I don’t begrudge anyone else their devotion to it.
None, I rarely rewatch a movie. (don’t mean to threadshit, but I think “none” fits the topic reasonably well. I have no beef with holiday movie traditions. I just don’t have one.)
Labor Day: from Mork and Mindy: Mork’s encounters with Exidor.
Christmas:
I like the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol. Edward Woodward is an excellent Ghost of Christmas Present, even if he is obviously on stilts in a couple of scenes.
The Patrick Stewart version is not bad. Joel Gray’s version of the Ghost of Christmas Past is interesting, even if he bears no resemblance to the book.
The Guy Pearce version is very hard to watch (3 hours of grimdark), but I love the ending. “I don’t want redemption. But I want Tiny Tim to live.”
Easter:
Some channel will have The Greatest Story Ever Told or Ben-Hur on. I rarely watch an entire film, but I often watch pieces.
The Greatest Story Ever Told is the epitome of everything wrong with Hollywood depictions of the Bible. (blue-eyed Jesus, etc.) but I enjoy it anyway.
In Ben-Hur, I love Sheik Ilderim. “One god, I can understand, but one wife? It is not civilized!. It is not . . . generous!”
I am allergic to schmaltz so I tread lightly here. Die Hard for Christmas is about all the sentiment I can handle and I even like that holiday. I just generally don’t like feeling manipulated.
I suppose I have seen the Charlie Brown Halloween special enough years at the appropriate time to mark that one as well.
The only thing that’ll get the family back together around the DVD player and TV at the same time is our annual showing of A Wish For Wings That Work.
Christmas:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Only the original Chuck Jones cartoon, narrated by Boris Karloff. Why bother with Jim Carey and Bededict Cumberbach?
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol – the first version I saw, and still overall my favorite.
A Christmas Carol – the Robert Zemeckis CGI version with Jim Carey doing several parts. It might be heretical to say this, but it’s overall the most faithful version, including obscure lines of dialogue direct from Dickens and often copying the original illustrations. I’ll tolerate the sometimes blatant slapstick in order to get the rest.
There are other really good versions of the story (many of which I have on disc), including Alastair Sim’s 1951 classic, or Richard Owens’ 1938 version, or George C. Scott’s magnificent TV movie (with no special effects to speak of), or Michael Caine in the Muppet version, or the Chuck Jones/Richard Williams animated version that was even more faithful in copying the original illustrations (sand which used Alastair Sim as Scrooge, again). And a whole lot of others. But I prefer the two above.
A Charlie Brown Christmas – The original, and nostalgic. It’s also the most blatant and honest Trojan Horsing of the Biblical account into prime time popular media of any Christmas product, yet it doesn’t feel forced.
I might watch Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, but I’m not committed to it (Did you know that there’s a much earlier animated cartoon version produced and directed by Max Fleischer? It’s in color, and from 1948. Fleischer studios was long gone, but Fleischer got much of his crew together for this classically animated version that predates the song by one year. It’s based on Robert L. May’s original book of Rudolph, so the story is completely different from either the song or the later Rankin-Bass versions . Interesting, and worth a look – Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948 film) - Wikipedia )
Incidentally, the cartoon is on YouTube. Several times
We just started this a couple years ago but somehow we decided to watch Warm Bodies for Christmas, then we followed it up with Shaun of the Dead. So it’s zombie movies for Christmas which I think fits because Jesus was a zombie, wasn’t he?