Amy Remeikis: Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Stop saying it isn’t
Spare me your feel-pinions over whether or not you believe it is a Christmas movie. I know it came out in July. I know its nods to the holiday season consist of a well-placed rendition of Let It Snow and a “Now I have a machine gun, ho, ho, ho”. I don’t care. It is the greatest action movie ever made, and it just doesn’t feel like Christmas without some John McClane “yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” sass and a tortured “Haaaaaaaaannnnnns”! He’s a weary traveller, forced into the office Christmas party from hell, who saves his family from Alan Rickman, while also making a lifelong friendship. If that is not the perfect holiday at home allegory (just swap out Rickman for your problematic relative and swap in alcohol for the lifelong friend), then I don’t know what is.
There’s redemption, there’s snow, it’s Christmas eve and Bruce Willis is everyone who was ever told to come to the coast for a get-together and a few laughs, only to end with someone locking themselves in the bathroom before the gifts are unwrapped. I’ve watched it every Christmas eve since I was a child, and I’ll watch it every Christmas eve to come. Welcome to the party, pal!
Steph Harmon: Never not cry-laughing at the escalator scene in Elf
I first saw Elf when I was in high school, and have watched it approximately 712 times since. Yes I’m aware it is a kids’ film but this is Christmas and also how dare you.
Raised as an oversized Christmas elf in the North Pole, Buddy one day discovers he’s actually human. In an attempt to track down his real dad, he takes his overflowing Christmas spirit and stupid-happy naivety to the mean, cold streets of New York. But the mean, cold streets of New York are no place for a boy like Buddy. Or are they????? (They are not.)
Elf is about loving yourself and finding your home. It’s about cherishing those who go against the grain and bring a little magic to the cut-throat world. But most of all it’s about putting an elf costume on Will Ferrell, and putting Will Ferrell on an escalator. The greatest Christmas miracle of all.
Brigid Delaney: No matter where I am, it’s carols on the TV
The family home has changed locations many times, but no matter where it is, whenever I walk through the door on Christmas Eve, Carols by Candlelight will be on television. I’ll sit down with whoever’s home, and watch whoever is hosting (Sonia Kruger? Glenn Ridge? David Campbell? Karl Stefanovic?) and sing along.
I have no desire to go to the actual Sidney Myer Music Bowl and hear carols IRL. I don’t even really like carols. But there’s something reassuring about sitting down with my family and watching it every year. And it’s only ever on at Christmas. It’s not like they screen a repeat in May.
The event originated in Melbourne in 1938 and has spread around the world – and considering so many of Australia’s Christmas traditions are inherited from Europe, that makes it even more special.
Lorena Allam: We know every word of the Princess Bride
For us, it’s the Princess Bride. We all curl up on the sofa on Christmas night (which is my favourite part, when the day is done and everyone feels content and a little bit sleepy) and re-watch this film. We know every word, and take it in turns to deliver the crucial lines.
If it’s been a slightly more stressful Christmas, the saccharine horror and darkly comic anarchy of Gremlins seems to help. Debate usually centres on who is more evil: Stripe (even in pink leg-warmers) or Mrs Deagle.
Jo Tovey: Old musicals are our family tradition
Childhood Christmases were spent marooned at my grandmother’s house in Dubbo, my extended family crammed indoors to escape the heat, watching VHS tapes of her extensive collection of mid-century musicals (at least until the Boxing Day Test began). She loved them – My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, Singin’ in the Rain – and by necessity, we came to love them too. They became so much a part of our holiday ritual that the annual singsong, which began with her banging out some cheerful carols on the piano, always descended into showtunes before too long. To me, the farm girl’s lament from Oklahoma – I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No – is as much a Christmas standard as Jingle Bells.
Calla Wahlquist: Doctor Who for the post-Christmas dinner slump
Doctor Who is – and I am going to make some enemies with the end of this sentence – the tuna mornay of television. Which is to say it is comforting, familiar and historically white. This is not a dis. I bloody love tuna mornay: it makes me feel safe, an assertion that should probably be psychologically examined. Doctor Who has the same effect, and is a tradition I adopted to fill the inevitable sadness when having Christmas away from my family.
It is a food coma of a show, the perfect pleasant but unchallenging combination for a post-Christmas dinner slump. Traditionalists can stick to the Christmas Special but any Who will do, especially if it features Thirteen’s excellent pants.
Luke Buckmaster: Jingle All The Way was unfairly maligned
Most of us have felt overwhelmed at one point or another by the hideous task of battling bloodthirsty shoppers to purchase presents that will soon be forgotten. The unfairly critically maligned 1996 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Jingle All the Way turns shopping angst into action cinema, the protagonist literally climbing over bodies to get his son that toy figurine everybody’s going nuts about. It strikes me as the kind of script that was initially very witty then suffered a series of compromises. And Schwarzenegger’s acting is atrocious, even by his standards. But it’s still good! I love Jingle All the Way’s energy and its devotion to its silly but appealing core concept. It’s one of those rare Christmas movies I can happily return to every year... at least, every second year.
Ben Smee: How To Make Gravy, over and over and over
I’m that family member each Christmas; the one who can’t always make it home. Often around that time of year, I’m on my way somewhere with my wife, so can’t switch on a screen. We have rules for the car radio. Christmas songs only. We alternate choices. She’ll pick a variety for classics. I’ll play How to Make Gravy by Paul Kelly over and over and over.
There’s a bit in the first verse where he sings “it’s the 21st of December / now they’re ringing the last bell” that to me sounds something like sleigh bells a-jinglin’. It’s the longing for an imperfect Australian Christmas in the stifling heat, with misfit relatives and gravy with a dollop of tomato sauce, for sweetness and that extra tang.
