Best Christmas films


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Tonguez said:
its not a Christmas movie however, the miracle could have happened in April while George was submitting his tax return, or maybe as part of Thanksgiving

or to really make a point Labor Day to show the solidarity of the proletariat angels ;)
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It’s funny how many American films around the same time are really positive about unions and socialism (It Happened on 5th Avenue, The Devil and Miss Jones, The Pyjama Game) in a way that seems almost unimaginable now. It was a different time and of course unions were on the rise as the first Gilded Age ended, but it’s still very interesting to see.

(To take those films in order - homeless people break into a millionaire banker’s mansion while he’s away over Christmas; a millionaire banker (the “Devil”) goes undercover in his own department store and ends up joining the union; a musical about union-employer negotiations in a pyjama factory.)

(Of those, It Happened on 5th Avenue is definitely a Christmas film and an excellent one at that.)
 

jian said:
I don’t think there were a lot of people who’d have called themselves Puritans in England in the 1840s, though many Christians would indeed have objected to the public celebration of Christmas, mostly considering it a private holiday for family.

ACC certainly helped promote the notion that it was a time for public and community celebration and generosity; Prince Albert had also popularised this concept by bringing in more German ideas about Christmas, including the Christmas tree.
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Moreover the Puritans would absolutely vilify a miser, while they promoted thrift Puritans were big on mutual aid and visible shows of piety, both things which Scrooges fails.
If anything Ebenezer is a nominal anglican that Dickens is using to criticise hollow respectability and empty piety.
 

Tonguez said:
Moreover the Puritans would absolutely vilify a miser, while they promoted thrift Puritans were big on mutual aid and visible shows of piety, both things which Scrooges fails.
If anything Ebenezer is a nominal anglican that Dickens is using to criticise hollow respectability and empty piety.
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Yes, exactly. The Puritans generally valued charity and Scrooge’s cold sneering, “Are there no workhouses?” would have horrified them.

(The line itself is of course a reference to the Poor Laws from a decade before, brought in by the Liberal government to be as uncharitable and cruel as possible. Even some modern governments and techbros would find them a bit much.)
 


jian said:
Do we have any reason to believe he’s Jewish? It probably would have been mentioned in the book by one of the characters. He was left at boarding school over Christmas because his strict father wanted him to, to toughen him up.

Ebenezer (despite being named after a battlefield in the book of Samuel) is more likely to be an English (or Scottish - Dickens apparently said he’s named after Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, a well-known Scottish miser of the period, though there’s no evidence that such a person existed) name than Jewish. His sister’s name is Fanny and his nephew’s is Frederick, so that’s of little help. I don’t think we know either way, but he’s unlikely to be Jewish.
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I just had to adapt A Christmas Carol for our staff holiday skit, so I am feeling pretty familiar with it right now!

There's nothing in the text that identifies him explicitly as Jewish, whereas he is idenitified implicitly as Christian (goes to Church , for example). He does embody a number of negative Jewish stereotypes from the period, though.
 

Clint_L said:
I just had to adapt A Christmas Carol for our staff holiday skit, so I am feeling pretty familiar with it right now!

There's nothing in the text that identifies him explicitly as Jewish, whereas he is idenitified implicitly as Christian (goes to Church , for example). He does embody a number of negative Jewish stereotypes from the period, though.
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You cant be claiming jewish stereotypes when absolutely nothing in the text mentions jews.
When Dickens uses Jewish chatacters, like Fagin, he makes that explicit.
Scrooge is coded as British christian business man, the story only works because he is part of the Christmas-aligned culture that is being critiqued.

Using a Jewish 'outsider' character or jewish stereotypes would lose the storys impact entirely
 
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Tonguez said:
You cant be claiming jewish stereotypes when absolutely nothing in the text mentions jews.
When Dickens uses Jewish chatacters, like Fagin, he makes that explicit.
Scrooge is coded as British christian business man, the story only works because he is part of the Christmas-aligned culture that is being critiqued.

Using a Jewish 'outsider' chatacter or jewish stereotypes would lose the storys impact entirely
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I think we can all agree that Charles Dickens traded in vicious Anti-Semetic, Anti-Catholic, and misogynistic stereotypes and was a world-class competitor for "Worst Husband Ever"...but yeah, Scrooge doesn't seem to be a Jewish caricature here.
 

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