5 classic Christmas movies to watch with the family this year

Jonah McKeown   By Jonah McKeown for CNA

December 24, 2022 Catholic News Agency News Briefs 1 Print

 

Scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life” / Credit: RKO Radio Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

St. Louis, Mo., Dec 24, 2022 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Fire up your favorite streaming service, and there’s no shortage of Christmas movies for you to snuggle up with this year. But if you’re a Catholic parent looking for a classic Christmas movie — especially a classic that’s appropriate and enjoyable for the entire family — here are some ideas:

1. It’s a Wonderful Life

Does this movie really need an introduction? Severely underappreciated in its day but gaining status as one of the most perennially rewatched Christmas movies of all time, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the epitome of classic Christmas movies.

It’s the story of a smart and ambitious small-town guy, George Bailey, who for a variety of reasons never manages to escape his provincial life and travel the world like he had always planned. When a seemingly insurmountable disaster besets George on Christmas Eve, he wishes he had never been born — a wish that, thanks to a friendly angel named Clarence, suddenly comes true. It’s only after this heavenly intervention that George realizes how important and yes, wonderful, his “ordinary” life truly was. (Try not to shed a tear during the final scene. I dare you. I always do!)

George’s lesson is a lesson for us all.

The director, Frank Capra, was Catholic and his faith shines through in this film (even if some elements, like the depictions of angels, are more poetic than they are theologically sound).

A famous quote is attributed to Capra: “My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other.”

Rated: PG

Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video, or available to rent from iTunes, Google Play, and others

2. A Muppet Christmas Carol

It hasn’t been around for quite as long as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but if at this point you still haven’t seen this beloved movie… What are you waiting for? This is, quite simply, the definitive film adaptation of a classic novel, and in the 30 years since it came out, it has itself become a classic.

This movie features the fun and witty Muppets you know and love playing Dickens’ characters with colorful gusto alongside a stoic Michael Caine, who turns in a genuinely compelling performance as the miserly Scrooge. Despite some predictably silly shenanigans throughout, few adaptations of Dickens’ work contain so many direct quotes from the book, and it makes for a genuinely moving film.

Of course, the story of “A Christmas Carol” contains few, if any, explicit mentions of Christ’s birth as the reason for the season. But the themes contained in Dickens’ ghostly tale — including care and concern for others, especially the poor — are vital to meditate on this time of year.

Be warned: You’re sure to be singing the songs from this movie for many Christmases to come! (“It’s in the singing of a street corner choir…”)

Rated: G

Where to watch: Streaming on Disney+, or available for rent from Prime Video, iTunes, Google Play, and others

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas

Commissioned by the Coca Cola Company, most of the people involved in creating the Peanuts Christmas special — the first TV adaptation of Charles M. Schulz’s smash-hit comic strip — thought it would be a total failure. Instead, they created a classic. Vince Guaraldi’s music alone is enough to make this worth an annual rewatch.

The special’s use of humor to lampoon the “commercialization” of the holidays serves as a great reminder to all of us to step back from the nonessential elements of the Christmas season and to focus on what truly matters: Christ’s birth.

Even in the 1960s, public displays of religion on network television were rare. But the Nativity story, recited in all its glory by the cerebral Linus, is the crux of the special and fills the melancholic Charlie Brown with a radiant — and infectious — joy.

Good grief!

Not rated

Where to watch: Streaming on Apple TV (for free Dec. 22 through Dec. 25 only)

4. White Christmas

A true Christmas family classic, “White Christmas” is about as old-school cinema as you can get, if you’re into that kind of thing. The musical numbers are witty and memorable, the dance routines are impressive, and the nostalgia factor — well, that’s off the charts. Featuring the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby and the hilarious Danny Kaye, the movie follows the pair — old war buddies turned entertainers — as they fall in love with a pair of singing sisters and follow them to a Pine Tree, Vermont, inn for the holidays. There they plan and execute a special Christmas event as a surprise to offer love and support to their former commanding officer, who now owns the floundering inn.

“White Christmas” may not be spiritually deep, but it has many positive themes throughout. Kids may not understand all the intricacies of the plot, but they’ll enjoy the Technicolor and the dancing.

Rated: TV-PG

Where to watch: Streaming on Netflix, or available for rent from Prime Video, iTunes, and others

5. The Sound of Music

This may seem like an unconventional choice, but hear me out. This timeless classic, packed with some of the best and most singable songs in all of cinema, takes place in summer, that’s true, and there’s no mention of Christmas. But it’s packed with joy and positive themes — including familial love, obedience, and resistance to evil. Plus, I’m certainly not the first person to point out that lyrics like “snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes” and “brown paper packages tied up with string” can’t help but conjure images of Christmas.

Beyond that, here is a movie that truly celebrates the Catholic faith. True, much of the storyline revolves around Maria leaving her life as a religious sister — but she does so because she’s found a new vocation as a mother to the Von Trapp children and as a loving companion to the formerly strict and jaded Captain Von Trapp. The scene where the couple wed in a beautiful Catholic cathedral is awe-inspiring unto itself.

Admittedly, part of the reason “The Sound of Music” stands out in people’s minds as a Christmas movie is the fact that ABC has aired the movie on cable close to the holidays every year for the past 20 years. The movie’s “universal themes of love, family, and overcoming hardship in the face of adversity are exactly what we’re all thinking about over the holiday season,” according to the channel’s programming executive. I’m inclined to agree!

Rated: G

Where to watch: Streaming on Disney+, or available for rent from Prime Video, iTunes, Google Play, and others. Airing on ABC Dec. 18 at 7/6 Central.

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News Briefs

Sistine Chapel Choir’s Met performance a real ‘wow moment’

May 9, 2018 CNA Daily News 1

New York City, N.Y., May 9, 2018 / 03:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A surprise performance by the Sistine Chapel Choir at the Met Gala this week left attendees in awe and helped convey the joy and beauty of the Church, said one of the organizers of the performance.

The choir’s performance had not been announced in advance, coming as a surprise to those present at the May 7 Met Gala, which takes place annually on the first Monday of May and serves as a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This year the Met exhibition, which opens May 10 and runs through October 2018, carries the theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and features around 40 items on loan from the Vatican.

The items, many of which come from the Sistine Chapel Sacristy’s Office for Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, range in time period from the mid-1700s up to the pontificate of Saint John Paul II.

Given the special nature of the Vatican items, they will be set up in a separate display from the other pieces, which include religious art from the Met collection itself and around 150 designer fashion pieces intended to pay homage to Catholicism and which draw inspiration from Catholic iconography, liturgy and other aspects of the faith tradition.

John Hale, one of the leading organizers of the choir’s surprise performance at the gala, told CNA that the evening “was really a wow-moment.”

Hale sits on the board of directors for the Vatican’s Patrons of the Arts, which consists of different chapters, most of which are in the United States, who fund restoration projects for the priceless treasures housed in the Vatican Museums.

At one point after the performance, Hale said Anna Wintour, Met board member and editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine Vogue, told him guests were unusually silent, commenting that “this is the quietest I’ve ever seen for this gala.”

Wintour, Hale said, told him attendees “were absolutely enthralled” by the performance. That sentiment, he added, “summed it up beautifully.”

“I spoke with a number of the attendees and mixed with them right after the performance and it was perfect silence, there was very good applause and reaction…so many folks were just really moved.”

Commonly referred to as “the pope’s choir,” the Sistine Chapel Choir consists of 20 professional singers from around the world, as well as a treble section composed of 35 boys aged 9-13, called the Pueri Cantores.

With a 1,500-year history, the Sistine Chapel Choir is believed to be the oldest active choir in the world.

According to Hale, who is also president and co-owner of Corporate Travel Service, the invitation to sing at the Met Gala came during the choir’s U.S. mini-tour in September 2017, during which the choir sold out performances in Washington D.C., New York and Detroit.

The choir’s director, Maestro Massimo Palombella, had approached Hale several years ago about creating a tour in the U.S. The September mini-version was essentially a test run, Hale said, and given the choir’s success during their fall tour, a longer nationwide tour is being organized for this summer.

Hale said he was initially hesitant when he was asked to help organize a performance at the gala, and had concerns over sensitivity to the Catholic faith. However, when the Vatican green-lighted the choir’s visit, he jumped on board and kept the performance under wraps for nearly a year up until the moment the choir filed in and began singing.

And having worked with the Met to get all the details in order, “I can really say they were not only respectful, they really wanted to communicate the beauty and faith of the Church,” he said. “I really had that sense, and it was very sincere. I was very moved by how sincere they were.”

The exhibit itself was “beautifully done,” and serves as “a real opportunity to express the Church’s teaching through beauty, through truth,” Hale said. “The same with the performance of the Sistine Chapel Choir.”

While there was some “outlandish fashion” that hit the red carpet at the gala, the vast majority of the 600 some attendees were “dressed beautifully and very appropriately,” he said.

“That might not be picked up traditionally because the media wants the outliers,” he said, explaining that while it is important to be sensitive to how the Church is portrayed, the Church also has to “go out.”

“We have to communicate beauty, and we have been invited, as a Church, to communicate what is our expression of beauty and our making manifest God’s presence through beauty,” he said, adding that in his opinion, “it would have been a crime not to respond to that invitation.”

Ultimately, what gets communicated through the beauty of things like fashion and music is God’s love, Hale said. “Everyone wants to be loved and we all need to be loved by God.”

Referring to a recent pastoral letter written by Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron titled “Unleash the Gospel,” which spoke of the need to find “shallow entry points” for evangelization, Hale said the Met exhibit and gala “was an entry point into encountering God through the true beauty and good.”

Choir members themselves felt both appreciated and respected by gala attendees, he said, noting that a number of the singers told him they could see people in the front row, and it was obvious they were captivated.

“Several choir members commented on the smiles, the joy, they could see genuine joy,” he said. “There was an exchange and a communication of joy that was palpable and apparent to the choir members and to the attendees.”

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