It’s a Wonderful, Weird Life: Writers Recommend Their Favorite Holiday Movies

I was never much of a fan of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) or classic holiday movies. If my partner and I watched anything, it was Mixed Nuts (1994) a dark comedy directed by Norah Ephron and starring Steve Martin. The film chronicles one long Christmas Eve at a suicide hotline in Venice Beach, California. The phone-bank workers are comically inept, more lost than the callers, and during the night they face eviction, a serial killer and an unwanted, constantly regifted fruit cake. A stream of visitors, including Adam Sandler and a “transvestite” played by Liev Shreiber, show up on the doorstop.

For years my partner and I overlooked the transphobic jokes—among some problematic depictions of mental illness—as we laughed through the raunchy movie. But we haven’t seen it since my partner came out as trans and started transitioning. So now we’re in search of a new holiday movie tradition… So I reached out to some writers I admire for recommendations.

Predictably, a number of writers mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life, but they renewed my interest in the film with fresh perspectives. One of the annual viewers was Julia Phillips, the 2019 National Book Award finalist and author of Disappearing Earth, a stunning collection of interconnected stories about the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia. Philips shared that she’s been “…delighted as an adult to go deeper each year into its extremely dark, weird, rageful vibes, as Jimmy Stewart absolutely crackles with thwarted passions and lashes out at everyone around him. What a wild character study.”

This description piqued my interest in returning to a childhood classic that I remembered as saccharine. We might not seek out “rageful” Christmas stories, but perhaps we experience catharsis in seeing characters come unhinged in holiday movies, which is how my wife and I experienced Mixed Nuts.

Jenn Bouchard, author of First Course (2021), a coastal Maine romance about a woman’s second act in life, reminded me that Home for the Holidays (1995) with Holly Hunter, is also about a woman coming undone at Thanksgiving. I will always remember the scene where Hunter is restoring a museum painting with gold leaf, feeling ecstatic about finally mastering a skill. Her boss wishes her a happy Thanksgiving, then fires her. She responds completely inappropriately—first by hugging and kissing him, then sneezing in his face. She spends the whole sniffly holiday weekend with her parents pretending to be happy while wrestling with personal and professional failure. It was the first unsentimental holiday movie I’d ever seen, and I loved it.

Next, I reached out to Kim Coleman Foote, who emailed me during a break from a fast-paced writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Works Center of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Foote described annual family screenings of A Christmas Story (1983). “I think what resonated… was that it was one of the first visualizations we’d seen on screen of my mother’s childhood in the 1940s,” she said. Foote’s forthcoming fictionalized family history, Coleman Hill, follows her family’s Great Migration journey from the South to New Jersey from 1916 to the 1980s. The novel will be published in September by Sarah Jessica Parker’s SLP Lit imprint of Zando.

Besides offering an opportunity to “vicariously experience” her mom’s nostalgia, Foote adds that A Christmas Story is “downright hilarious, with an imperfect and relatable family.” The family’s furnace chugs with smoke, and their Oldsmobile is always breaking down, but the little boy named Ralphie still presses his face against the toyshop window, salivating over a BB Gun. His mom’s response to his Christmas dream: “No, you’ll shoot your eye out.”

The fantasy sequence in which Robbie imagines mowing people down with his rifle may not sit well with today’s audiences. Still, there are many memorable scenes, such as the one where Ralphie pressures his friend to lick a frozen flagpole. When I saw the boy with his tongue stuck to the pole, and a mouth full of bloody tissues, I had a visceral memory of seeing the movie in a theater with my dad at age four. The flagpole-tongue scene is an unforgettable—if not a particularly Christmassy—moment.

Meredith Hambrock, author of Other People’s Secrets (2022), a crime novel about a woman called Baby (who was abandoned in a dumpster as an infant), plans to divide her holiday viewing time between mystery-thrillers and lighter entertainment. “There’s something about the holidays that makes me want to take a break from the usual grit and violence that plagues my brain. However, I do find it’s impossible to turn that side of my mind completely off.” She’s looking forward to the new horror Santa flick, Violent Night, and plans to rewatch Gremlins, especially for one particular Christmas carol scene.

Another Gremlins fan is Ananda Lima, author of Mother/Land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize, and the story collection, Craft, forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan Books. The first Gremlins movie is Christmas-themed, but the second one is her favorite as an innovative storyteller because it’s “so over the top, postmodern, and meta.” When she was growing up in Brazil, Gremlins was often on TV and dubbed in Portuguese. In the story “Tropicália” in Craft, she reflects on an immigrant’s experience of buying the Gremlin Gizmo’s keychain in a vintage store:

“When the woman said the word ‘gremlins,’ it took a second for my brain to map the word as she pronounced it to the way the word had lived in my head as a child. We said ‘gremilins’ in Portuguese, that extra i added like a drop of water to the back of a mogwai, giving rise to an additional syllable. When I realized the keychain was Gizmo, I reached for it immediately. I estimated how many times I’d watched Gremlins 2 in ‘Sessão da Tarde’’ reruns in Brazil.

Every afternoon I ate lunch with my brother and sister and watched the soap operas. After the novelas came the few movies TV Globo had dubbed in Portuguese. The same recognizable voices regurgitated out of the mouths of different characters, over and over in all the movies they showed. How strange to feel at that moment that the little Gizmo was more rightly mine than theirs, that American couple who clearly missed the movie’s brilliance.”

The poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes, author of Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms, recommended I check out Elf (2003). Will Ferrel plays a 6’3’’ human named Buddy who was raised by elves. When he learns he was adopted, he searches for his biological father in a “magical place”—New York City—with nothing but an Empire State Building snow globe to guide him. Holnes said the movie appealed to him as someone who migrated to New York from Panama.

As he studied in different universities in the US, he felt as if he was “…looking to fulfill the version of the US that I saw on TV when I was growing up.” For him, Elf “encapsulates… the wild sense of serendipity” from his childhood and the more “hard-edged” cynicism he’s also experienced living in New York. The intersection of these two New Yorks felt deeply satisfying during the holidays, a time when we are often reflecting on who we are, and where we came from. He identified with Buddy as someone who felt like a fish out of water. But, he said with a laugh, “I hesitate to call Buddy an immigrant because he comes from the North Pole, which isn’t a country that exists.”

Tara Stillions Whitehead, a novelist and former TV writer, watches television during the holidays to help her remember her roots. “I will binge watch an entire season of Roseanne just to remember what it felt like to be a kid from a working class family.” The show gives her comfort, reminding her how “humor is a necessary ingredient in managing the crises of the home.” In one show, there’s a joke about Roseanne, the mom, being 36 years old. It hit Whitehead hard. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t Becky, the daughter, she was Roseanne. “I absolutely lost it,” she reflects. “I’m actually older than Roseanne.”

Movies can help us connect with who we are, but sometimes we need layers of media, film and music, to help us remember who we are. For Holnes, the perfect holiday cocktail is a blend of Elf , Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton. He also throws in some listening sessions of Christmas in Jamaica with Shaggy. Although he didn’t grow up in Jamaica, the lyrics about Christmas in a hot, sunny climate help him remember holidays in Panama. “All the other holiday stuff is about how cold it is outside,” he said. So that album satisfies an itch that Elf does not.

Holnes noted that immigrants may not always be able to carry physical objects or heirlooms into the future. When these family treasures have gone missing during migration, movies can serve as a bridge across the generations. Films can become family’s touchstones, and with digital media, “there’s always room on the mantel for new heirlooms” Holnes said.