Most US series will have a Christmas episode, but it’s usually not much of a “special”: It just runs on the show’s regular day of the week, for the regular amount of time, and is shown on some week shortly before Christmas. Our “Christmas Specials” are mostly old classics, and didn’t even necessarily correspond to a regular show (like “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown”-- There wasn’t a regular Peanuts TV show, just specials). And even those aren’t necessarily shown on Christmas Day itself, just in the season.
A Christmas Story is an especially good one to show on Christmas marathons, since it’s so episodic: If you have twenty minutes between finishing wrapping gifts, cooking, and the guests showing up, you can turn it one, see a vignette or two, and go back to doing other things, and not really be missing out.
It’s A Wonderful Life, the other Christmas marathon movie, doesn’t quite work as well for this: I think I saw each individual scene of that at least five times before I realized they were all part of the same movie, and it wasn’t until years after that, yet, that I saw it start-to-finish in one sitting.
Nope, usually a week or two before during their regular airing day and time. Quite often one-off Christmas specials (Charlie Brown, Rudolph,etc) are shown in the first couple of weeks of December.
In my family we usually don’t watch any TV on Christmas day primarily because there usually isn’t time. For the past decade we have spent Christmas morning with my in-laws, then the afternoon with my family, and then back to my in-laws for dinner. Usually my MIL underestimates how long it will take the meat to cook by at least an hour, so by the time dinner and dessert are finished and the dishes are done, everybody is ready for bed.
Is he Jewish? It is traditional for Jews to have Chinese food and go to the movies on Christmas.
There is now a greater variety of foods from ethnicities that don’t celebrate Christmas in the US, though. Indian food on Christmas is also a delicious option.
Didn’t they always used to play The Sound of Music on Xmas? Not really a holiday movie (except for a line or two in one song), but I remember it still being a tradition on network TV, similar to The Ten Commandments every Easter.
That’s pretty much the holiday custom with American broadcast network TV. The perception in TV circles is that Americans generally tune-out during the holiday season. Thus, during the two weeks between roughly December 20th and January 2nd, the networks are more or less on autopilot and run nothing but repeats. About the only new programming you’ll get during this period (as mentioned previously) is sports-related with the NBA, college bowl games, and the end of the regular NFL season/first round of NFL play-offs.
Actually, in the US, going to the movies on Christmas evening is something gentiles do too (although the theaters usually are closed on Christmas Eve). Along with summer, it’s the time of year when the studios have their big “popcorn” movies out as well as their more “serious” Oscar-bait films.
I didn’t know, until reading this thread, that there was such a tradition in the UK. I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything like it in the US. I don’t remember ever watching TV on Christmas Day.
On the other hand, in the month or so leading up to Christmas, there are plenty of Christmas specials on TV: the children’s Christmas specials (Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials), airings of Christmas-themed movies, Christmas-themed episodes of regular series, and (more so in the old days when TV was dominated by the Big Three networks) Christmas variety specials by people like Bob Hope, Andy Williams, or the Muppets.
So I’m guessing you don’t get two months of Christmas-broadcast advertising that our channels run in the lead up? The main channels run endless ads highlighting the ‘goodies’ they’ll be showing over the Christmas season - Christmas specials, new series, network film premieres. I’m beginning to think we Brits are TV obsessed, or very antisocial at Christmas…
You won’t find a cinema - or anything much apart from corner shops - open on Christmas Day in the UK. And we’re a heathen lot.
This would have been my answer some years, but we spend Christmas most years in homes with real(ish) fireplaces.
I make a point of watching these during the “Christmas Season” which to me falls between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the later the better. Though didn’t someone post last week that her local store was selling Christmas items already?
Is your real name Linda and did you grow up in NY? I used to visit a friend’s home and there was an amazing amount of John Wayne art and artifacts (knick knacks?).
I used to take my kids to the movies in the afternoon on Christmas day every year because it was a nice way to get them excited about something that happened after the presents.
One year in about the third row was an old guy with white beard, read shirt and big black boots with his head thrown back snoring away. My kids were pretty small, and thrilled that they’d uncovered the secret of what Santa does after his big night.
We don’t watch anything as the family has gotten together. You can watch any television show anytime now. It’s not like it was before VCR’s when something was only available once a year. Family outranks television in our houses.
I used to manage a movie theater, so had to work holidays all the time. I never ceased to be amazed by patrons who would approach me, saying sympathetically (but unironically) how tough it must be for me to have to work on the holiday.
Since my wife and I are just the two of us and don’t really do the gift exchange thing, Christmas is pretty mellow and inert–and since so many movies come out during that time of the year that we want to see, we usually end up catching a couple in the theater that day.
A slight hijack to note: I had the same thought for, oh, 50 years, and always wondered what the hell The Ten Commandments had to do with Easter.
Then a light bulb went on. It’s not being shown every year at Easter; it’s being shown every year at Passover. :smack:
Back to the OP: my family looooves Christmas movies, but we get our fill of them between Thanksgiving and Xmas Eve. On Xmas Day, if the TV is on at all it’ll be on a football game.
It’s not just Christmas Day in Britain - the entire Christmas period from about the 23rd to the 2nd of January is filled with special editions of all the popular shows, not just dramas, there are special runs of films, all sorts of novel stuff. There’s something of a tradition, lessening now that there are so many channels and things other than TV to distract us, of grabbing the extra thick Radio Times and other TV guides just before Christmas and poring over all the cool stuff that’s going to be on.
[eta] and I somehow missed post #28 where **SanVito **said most of that.
