Arbitrary Numbers: Top # Christmas Movies (in my collection)

Holiday times are upon us!  As I run around shopping for presents and planning parties and getting ready for Christmas wrestling this weekend, I find I am running out of time to just sit and watch films, even less to head to the movie theatre.  So I though I'd look about my collection, and the holiday spirit hit me!  I have so many wonderful things I own and want to watch in time for Christmas, and I know I won't have enough time!  So I decided I'll go ahead and just do an Arbitrary Numbers so I can talk about as many as I can as soon as I could so that you all can try to find them and add them to your shopping carts and get them just in time for the Holidays!  So let's begin this special Christmas task!

The Top 7 Christmas Movies 

(in my collection)

((that I feel like talking about))

Twas the Night Before Christmas

I really love Rankin and Bass cartoons.  Their claymation stuff gets a lot of attention, but their cartoons are especially ... special for me.  The Hobbit, the Last Unicorn, these were for me the first forays into my favorite genre, just as I was reading the Hobbit and the Belgariad and the Dragonlance books.  The Rankin and Bass Christmas stuff is probably even more well known, but I want to talk about my favorite one, which like I said, is animated.

Twas the Night Before Christmas is a fun musical addition to the poem, talking about a clockmaker trying to help the town but everything gets screwed up because of the mice in his house, who are anthropomorphic (big plus for my viewing as a kid).  The entire special, which is not long, ends with the poem itself.  I love this little thing, and am so happy to have it in my collection.  It isn't perfect, it's short, and the animation is probably too off-putting or "ugly" for some I suspect.  But like I said, I love it.

Grade: B++

It is very sad to know that Arthur Rankin Jr. had passed away this January.  I didn't even hear about it until recently.  Thank you very much for this little special, and so many others that touched my heart, as well as basically everyone else's.  RIP.

Ernest Saves Christmas

I talked about this in my machine gun style review RIGHT HERE.  Go check that out, because this is great.

Grade: B++

Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol

I bunched these two together because they are my favorite Christmas Carols on film!  These are filled with music and characters and wonder.  But they also do not miss the tone of the book, the ghost story and morality story.  You see Mickey cry for goodness sakes!  I love them both and watch them both every year.

I should also point out that I have the blu-ray of Mickey's and the DVD of Muppet.  Why?  Well the new blu-ray of Mickey's has a bunch of other winter and Christmas specials that make the whole thing a wonderful collection piece to own, only missing one Donald Duck short I remember from my childhood that I wish I had, which is hardly a knock for all the other things it adds.  But why didn't I upgrade Muppet Christmas Carol?  Because the blu-ray is missing a song!  A beautiful song sung by Michael Caine and Scrooge's lost love.  It is amazing and heartwrenching and beautiful and necessary in my eyes for the story.  You see, it isn't in widescreen, so the blu-ray just didn't include it.  But it is in fullscreen, which I can watch with an option on my DVD.  So there you go!  I'm sure you were all curious.

Grade: A+++ for both

Rare Exports

Wanna watch a weird quirky adventure film about Christmas and demons and hunting and little boys and Norway?  Rare Exports is a beautiful film.  It is a touching film.  And it is an exciting film!  Most people talk about Die Hard when they need a Christmas action movie, or Gremlins for a Christmas fun comedy horror.  But both of those films are really only kind of Christmas-y.  Rare Exports hits all the buttons those two films do, but it is all so much more about Christmas.  Rare Exports should not replace either, but it should sit beside them!

Included on the blu-ray are the two original shorts that brought the full film into being.  Both shorts are great, with the second being my absolute favorite, and are both a little more tongue-in-cheek and crazy.  As an entire package, it has become a yearly tradition, and I love sharing it with people.  So I'm sharing it with you.  See it!  Find it!  Do it!!

Grade: A++

Christmas Eve on Sesame Street

I feel like I talk about this special all the time.  There are actually two versions of the Sesame Street special for Christmas that came out at the same time.  THIS one is perfect.  The other one is garbage.  This one is about a sweet story of Big Bird worried that Santa can't fit down the chimneys, it is filled with wonder, it is filled with amazing music and great jokes, it has Bert and Ernie being ridiculous and doing the Gift of the Magi, it has Oscar singing a song about hating Christmas, it has the most amazing pratt fall sequence just ... at ALL.  *sigh*

I love this little special.  Even better, it is on DVD, and I'm pretty sure it can be found at Best Buys just around.  So take a look!  You will not regret it.

Grade: A++

Now, I could talk about a lot more movies and specials I own that mean something to me and I love watching, like Jingle all the Way or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or Reindeer Games, which are all great and different for a bunch of reasons.  And who knows, I may just write reviews for them anyway later on this month.  But I really want to talk about a cool documentary I bought for my wife as a gift instead to close this little article out ...

I am Santa Claus

In this documentary, we follow five men, all "real beard Santas."  We see their life struggles, their regular world life, and we even get to see one man's quest to be a good Santa.  That man is Mick Foley, Hardcore Legend.  This documentary is not for families.  It is very adult.  And it is very touching.  

We watch four men, all vastly different, talk about what it means to be Santa Claus to them, all of them from different parts of the country, all from different walks of life, and all of them real people.  This isn't a "happy endings" kind of documentary.  This followed all of these guys for one year and cuts between and juxtaposes them as the film goes along.  You are allowed into their lives and get to see their hardships, their delights, just ... life.  It was a great documentary, and really touching as well as sad and poignant.  I cannot recommend it enough, and I am NOT a documentary person.

Grade: A+

There we go!  Now, I gotta go wrap more presents and other stuff.  Oh, did I tell you, I'm hosting a Dirty Santa party?  Do you wanna know what that is?  Well you are in luck, because I will be explaining it entirely and showing pictures of our game and party in ONE WEEK, on the 18th, which is one week before Christmas!  See ya then for that!  Also look forward to lots more Christmas reviews, wrestling reviews this Friday and on Monday, and a lot of great End of Year reviews!  Buh-bye!