Many years ago, my sister, her best friend, and I went in search of a dreidel on Christmas Eve. This was made particularly difficult because Hanukkah had fallen early in December that year, and the stores that might have had one earlier in the month by Christmas did not. What ended up happening was that I remembered that I had learned how to make a dreidel in Girl Scouts or some such, long years even before that Christmas, and I took some thin cardboard and a pencil and made a very bad dreidel, with my sister’s (Jewish, which is how all this came up) best friend writing the letters on it, because she remembered them. And then we filled it with lentils to weight it, which didn’t work. It was the worst dreidel ever. Still, it could have been worse—we could have gone looking for a Hanukkah movie instead.
It is at the best of times trying to be a minority religion in the US. I grew up Catholic, but I lost the faith in grade school and haven’t been even Christian since the ’90s. There are I promise you no movies about Yule. If there are, I’m not sure I want to see them; Pagans have this awful habit of pretending that Yule and Christmas are basically the same holiday but without the Jesus bits, and while there’s an argument to be made, that doesn’t mean I want to put up with someone’s version of “Silent Night” rewritten with bad Pagan lyrics, much less watch the kind of movie a person who would do that would then make about the holiday. And there are no famous out Pagans in the movie industry. I mean, at least Jews get that episode of Rugrats, right?
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I still listen to Linus tell me the true meaning of Christmas, and I watch Cary Grant teach David Niven that what matters isn’t a cathedral. I will watch Rex and Herb introduce various carols as sung by various Claymation figures. Jimmy Stewart? Thanks; I’d rather watch him in After the Thin Man for New Year’s Eve. But I’ll watch Natalie Wood discovering her imagination. I may even suffer through my cousin being stuck in an airport on Christmas and having a heartwarming moment with Lewis Black, though my cousin wouldn’t ask it of me. I grew up in this country, too, and I grew up watching the same movies every other American kid does for Christmas.
But I think there is more than one reason that my favourite Christmas movie is The Ref. Part of it is that even my family isn’t as bad as that one, and it’s kind of reassuring to remember that once a year. But part of it is that it’s a Christmas movie that doesn’t stick to the trappings of Christmas. It isn’t just the Santa Lucia wreaths, though they’re pretty entertaining. It’s that the movie is really about the secular pains of the holiday season as much as anything else. My boyfriend and son and I may have had our holiday dinner on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to his brother’s house for Christmas dinner, and I’m willing to bet his family would be shocked to know we’ve already exchanged our presents. Because we’re grown-ups, and we can have presents whenever we want to.
What’s worse, I think, is that people seem to think that, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, you should obviously be celebrating Festivus. Which, no. Leaving aside that I really hate Jerry Seinfeld at the best of times, I do actually have a holiday to celebrate. When I still had a job, I got Yule off and had a party with the people I loved. (Though one of my best friends has her anniversary that day and is always busy!) I worked Christmas, because it wasn’t my holiday and they were paying time-and-a-half. And I mean, what else was I going to do? Watch twenty-four hours of A Christmas Story? Thank you, no. Actually, it’s pretty secular, too—that family doesn’t even consider church, you’ll notice—but there’s more to a good holiday movie for a non-Christian than just being secular.
Maybe instead of making yet another dreadful Christmas movie, someone should consider making a holiday movie about someone else’s holiday. I grant you it will probably be just as dreadful, because what makes most Christmas movies bad is not the Christian part. Oddly, given how dreadful most Christian movies are these days. Though there is that drive to be wholesome, which is the other thing I like about The Ref. Those of us who aren’t Christian even in theory are still caught up in the same holiday bewilderment as everyone else, and we don’t even have movies about ourselves to help us through the long winter nights stuck with family.
