We are launching headlong into the Holiday Movie Season on TV. When I was a kid, this was the time of year when you could see It’s a Wonderful Life as many times as you liked. Or as many times as you were forced to by a relative who liked it more than you did, of course. Which is how a lot of people my age saw it, which is probably why most of us don’t seem to like it very much. Eight times a holiday seasons is probably seven too many, in my opinion.

But you know, that’s the thing. Even when the characters in holiday movies don’t get along with their families, they always seem to learn to by the end. Even my favourite Christmas movie, which is mostly on the theme that you don’t have to get along with your family if they’re evil, ends with the restoration of a seemingly broken marriage. My second-favourite Christmas movie? Also ends with the restoration of a marriage.

The first time I ever watched There Will Be Blood was on Thanksgiving, which I was not spending with family. I haven’t spent Thanksgiving with my own family I think since I was a teenager. See, I was twenty the year my sister got involved with my brother-in-law. For a long time, she was my only family within hundreds of miles. And my brother-in-law and I don’t really get along. So my sister and I don’t get together much anymore. Heck, starting in seventh grade, my mother stopped spending Thanksgiving with my grandmother, who lived across town from us, because of a fight with her sister, who hosted family Thanksgiving that year. So I would rather be watching Daniel Day-Lewis and Daniel Plainview’s dysfunctional family than putting up with my own.

I’ve been dealing a lot this year in my personal life with family that doesn’t get along. Not just my own. I have friends who have serious trouble with their families for various reasons. Legitimate reasons. I’ve known people disowned for being gay. I’ve known plenty of people with abusive parents. One friend has lived most of her life with an abusive grandmother who ended up kicking her out for no good reason. All of us watch the stories where family learns the True Meaning of Arbor Day or whatever and start getting along after all with a great deal more pain than I think those with decent families know.

I love my family. I just don’t always like them. And I don’t think movies really know how to deal with that. They certainly don’t know how to deal with abusive families. My friend’s grandmother isn’t exactly Joan Crawford. She’s just, you know, someone who spent my friend’s entire childhood emotionally battering her and worsening some issues she had from her parents, who are still alive but not equipped to raise her. But in the end, even Christina Crawford was expected to come to terms with her abusive parent.

There’s this theory that people who don’t see anyone like them in their media suffer from it emotionally. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that I get tired of it. If I ever get back into a place where I’m writing fiction, maybe I should write a new holiday movie. The one where the characters don’t go home for Thanksgiving, because they already are home with people who they have chosen as their families. They won’t celebrate a joyous reunion with their parents or siblings or whatever at the end, because they don’t have to. Sometimes, that isn’t a happy ending.