All I want for Christmas is You
What is it about Christmas movies that makes everybody so happy? November hasn’t started yet and these cheesy romantic stories are already everywhere– TV, Netflix, you name it. Even those who do not celebrate Christmas enjoy watching them, or have seen them at least once. All the classics pop up for the following months: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Christmas Vacation (1989), Home Alone (1990), and so on… The list could be endless.
As delightful as they might be, they could also have certain adverse consequences. Thanks to them, our perception of the time of Christmas and the holidays has been altered. Now our expectations are twice as high as they initially were; we all should be the happiest we have ever been, nice, kind, ‘true’, receive lots of presents, be surrounded by all your friends and family… Everything should be ‘perfect’. And if –as it usually happens in reality– our life does not meet the expectations, well, we blame us, and those around us for not being good enough.
Personally, I like to believe people are not stupid. That they are very well aware of these facts I have put down, and still they (we) continue to watch these movies, year after year, the same old films, or even other new ones that join the list. Even if they provide a distorted notion of reality, they also provide something else: hope. Excuse me if I am the one that sounds cheesy now, but Christmas movies do provide a certain comfort and warmth, a longing for a better world in which everything at the end is solved and people can be happy.
They depict the values and ideas which are supposed to be present during this time, and they remind us of how should we behave, at least for one night. What is it about Christmas movies that makes everybody so happy? –Well, why wouldn’t they?
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