Holiday Winds
I have a raft of holiday movies that are important to me year after year. I started this “collection” during my last year in college and attribute it all to my pal Mike Parkinson for some reason. I don’t actually remember ever watching Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas with Mike, but that’s the movie that started it all for me. I remember going to a long-since defunct restaurant called Turbacks out by Truman State Park and going up into the loft with Mike and our friend Debbie McCoy (now Paxton) to watch a showing of James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the George M. Cohan Story. I’m not sure why I connect Mike (and probably Debbie too) with White Christmas, but I do. Maybe its because Mike seems like a blend of Bing and Danny or maybe its because Mike and Debbie were my most notable Christian friends from college (the others being Jewish and while some of them celebrated Christmas, enthusiasm for Bing and Christmas in Vermont was less obvious). I try not to start my holiday viewing until Thanksgiving, but watching Kim watch an endless stream of Hallmark Holiday movies has pushed the season with me and I turned on The Holiday the day before Thanksgiving to get the season started officially.
The Holiday stars Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Jack Black and Eli Wallace and tells the tale of a Surry/L.A. house swap that turns into matching new love affairs. In an early scene, Jack Black, a native Angeleno in actuality, tells Kate Winslet about the Santa Ana winds that tend to blow during the holidays some years. He tells her that anything can happen when the Santa Ana winds blow. These “Red Winds” or “Devil Winds” are very often referenced in popular movies and books and are said to have a meaningful impact on the moods of the residents of Southern California when the warm dry winds blow in from the Great Basin. Well, in the last few days we have gotten a Red Flag Warning from Cal Fire pertaining to the high Santa Ana dry winds that are expected this week, drying out the underbrush and raising the risk of wildfire in the area. We take such things very seriously out here since wildfire both costs us money (in Insurance premia and other things) and can displace us from our homes at a moment’s notice.
I noted a comment today on a locally-oriented social media site called Next Door. Somebody decided to take the piss out of Cal Fire and its Santa Ana predictions, which haven’t really materialized too much yet. They posted that the winds had picked up on Palomar Mountain from 2mph to 3mph in the course of several hours. This 50% increase was obviously not too troubling to any of us or the local fire brigades and was clearly said tongue-in-cheek. While I’m sure it was not all in good fun, I’m also not sure its a good idea to make fun of anything Cal Fire does. They are what stands between us and a very bad day when the wind decides to blow the wrong way.
It used to be hard to get into the holiday spirit when the weather hits 80 degrees by noon, but that seems to have changed for me now. I guess I’m used to the weather out here and I love it when the warm winds start to blow at this time of year. It almost feels unfair to live in a place with such fine weather. And as for the seasonality, I am having no problem feeling in the holiday state of mind. I’m ready to move from the second-string “starter” movies like The Holiday into the mainstream. The order of watching only really matters with the first of my top five, Miracle on 34th Street (the 1947 version with or without colorization added), since the movie starts at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which aired this morning after a one-year Pandemic hiatus. I expect a viewing tonight or tomorrow at the latest.
The other first-string films on my list include White Christmas (1954, the year of my birth), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Love Actually (2003), and Elf (2003). I added Elf for Kim, but I have grown to love it just as she does. This selection is probably not all that controversial, but when we get into the second-string things get a bit more difficult. The easy second-stringers include The Holiday (2006), Four Christmases (2008), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), and Home Alone (1990). The ones that are less obvious are Scrooged (1988), Die Hard (1988), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967) and The Santa Clause (1994). By the time you get down the list to the second-string you get into all sorts of individual idiosyncrasies which means the choices are subject to lots of debate. Die Hard is the classic lightning rod for debate since there are only a few Christmas mentions like “Ho, Ho, Ho, I have a Machine Gun”.
The movie I can’t bring myself to put on the list that gets a #3 rating from Rotten Tomatoes is Holiday Inn (1942) with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. It’s true that Bing made this classic twelve years before he replaced Fred Astaire with Danny Kaye and that it actually debuted the song White Christmas, but I have my reasons. When I first started making up my list of favorites, I would occasionally mistake Holiday Inn for White Christmas and only realize my mistake an hour or so into the movie. I would end up feeling very disappointed when I realized I was not going to get to enjoy General Waverly getting his “We’ll Follow the Old Man…” serenade just before the snow starts to fall on his Vermont inn.
I like to think we are always open-minded enough to consider new movies to add to our favorites list. For instance, I recently watched Dan in Real Life, which has nothing to do with Christmas, but takes place during Thanksgiving, and therefore might be in contention. In it, Steve Corell, plays a single father, home for a family holiday with his three daughters. He manages to fall for his brother’s girlfriend to rather funny consequences. Another movie that I always gravitate towards is The Family Stone, which also tells the story about a family struggling with acceptance of new members while working through a crisis of a mother with terminal cancer. The story is both a sad family tale and yet an uplifting story about how life goes on in one form or another.
Speaking of life going on, any minute now I expect that we will be welcoming the first of our holiday family guests for our own Thanksgiving dinner. I also notice that the wind is picking up. I had better wrap this up since anything might happen from here. You gotta watch out for those holiday winds.