Review

Christmas culture

Culture

20 December 2023

5 min read

Five Christmas films to revel in

Haunting, salving, teary, side-splitting and glorious - our recommended festive films.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Muppet characters dressed as Dickensian characters stand in a snowy street.

'Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story.'

‘Tis the season to be jolly and watching a good film with a cup of tea and a biscuit, while the freezing wind and rain whip at the window, can be one of the jolliest things you can do this year. The genre of ‘Christmas’ has only grown and grown over the decades, so if you’re stumped by the myriad of choices – often dreadful schlock that feature the word ‘Prince’ and ‘Christmas’ in the title superimposed over a picture of two ludicrously attractive people staring lovingly into each other’s eyes in a blizzard – take comfort in my Top 5 Christmas films.

Note – this is my top 5. My personal top 5. These are not the ‘best’ Christmas films. You will not find It’s a Wonderful Life on here. It is glorious and lovely, but I saw it too late in life, and just don’t emotionally resonate with it as much as other Christmas films. I will not apologise. You will not see Die Hard. It is indeed and iconic action film, with a superb Alan Rickman performance, and it is indeed set at a Christmas party…but that isn’t enough to make it a ‘Christmas film’. I WILL NOT APOLOGISE!

5. The Nightmare Before Christmas

An animated scene shows a grandmother readng a story to children on her lap in front of a fire.

I would have put this film higher up the list if not for the fact that it straddles two seasons – All Hollows and Christmas. This film is iconic, however. The stop-motion animation gives the whole affair an extra haunting air. The music is superb – I still find myself humming What’s This every few weeks. The story is unhinged (what else do you expect from Tim Burton?) but to just the right degree, and behind the ghoulish setting and mad-cap story there is a good old-fashioned moral-of-the-story for children and adults alike to enjoy. Nightmare is a marvellous reminder of what it means to have the Christmas spirit, and the great thing about it is that it’s a film you can enjoy any time from October 31st!

4. Bad Santa

A dishevelled looking Santa, without a beard, stares to the side.

Billy Bob Thornton is mesmerising as an ‘eating, drinking, sh***ing, f***ing Santa Claus’. This is not one for the kids! Thornton’s Willie T. Soke is a professional thief who, with his dwarf assistant, get jobs as a grotto Santa and Elf in shopping malls during the festive season so as to case the place and rob it…but this time is different. Soake’s degeneracy has become a serious liability, and his instability and vulgar sexual exploits catch the attention of John Ritter’s mall manager and Bernie Mac’s security chief. Soake is spiralling out of control, but perhaps a romantic relationship with Lauren Graham’s barmaid and a chance encounter with a vulnerable young boy (to whom Soake becomes the least appropriate father-figure) might just be his salvation, and teach him the spirit of Christmas. The script is jet-black funny, and all the performances are spot on – although this is entirely Thornton’s film to shine in. Lewd, rude, and crude, but with a heart of gold (deep down under all the effing and jeffing), this film is the perfect antidote for those who find the jollity of the festive season a little twee.

3. The Holiday

A couple, wrapped up in winter clothes, flirt with each other.

This film has Jude Law in it. This ought to be enough to commend it to you, but I’ll go further. This film has Jude Law playing a jumper-wearing widowed single-dad, who can turn the humble napkin into a delightful children’s entertainment, and who gives smouldering glances across a crowded pub. Before you all rush out to watch it, let me finish the blurb. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslett are two women, unlucky in love, who decide to swap homes for the Christmas holiday. Winslett is escaping a toxic infatuation and finds solace in a friendship with a nonagenarian scriptwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a possible romance with Jack Black (giving a genuinely restrained and enjoyable performance). Workaholic Diaz is desperate to learn how to switch-off, relax, and maybe give love a chance. She finds solace in…Jude Law’s many lovely jumpers and smouldering glances. This is not a film to be described but experienced. Its camp and frothy and silly, but its also just really lovely and gets the tears going every time. If my recommendation isn’t enough, listen to my wife – watch this film over Christmas!

2. The Muppet Christmas Carol

Kermit, a frog talks to rats dressed as Victorian children.

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t improve upon the indominable prose of Charles Dickens…WRONG! Dickens made the fatal error of not putting Muppets into his story. Rizzo and Gonzo take on the role of narrators of the story, Kermit does a sparkling turn as Bob Cratchit, and Michael Cain stars as the best on screen iteration of Scrooge (go on, fight me on this!). It’s the well-worn story brought to life by glorious songs – every year I start to sing “Tis the season to be jolly and joyous” to myself – a side-splitting script, and a clear and tender reverence for the original story and its central message. I defy anyone, child or adult, to sit through to the end this wonderful film and not want to keep Christmas in their heart every day. If you don’t like this film then I can only guess that you’ll be visited by ‘Marley and Marley, WOOOOOOOOOOA’!

1. Love Actually

Richard Curtis is my favourite director. Every film of his, however flawed (and there a several flaws in Love Actually), is so warm-hearted and good-natured that I can’t help but love them. Love Actually is Curtis firing on all cylinder: a painfully funny script, an ensemble cast of Britain’s finest talent, and a score that plays your emotions like a fiddle. A series of interconnecting love stories – love found, love lost, unrequited love, misdirected love – playing out in the run-up to Christmas, this film will not fail to put a tear in your eye and smile on your face. At times it’s a little too ‘laddy’ – I’m looking at you American sexcapade storyline – and the fact that all these people live in gorgeous houses in Wandsworth in spite of doing no discernible work is infuriating, but the fact that it is number one on this list in spirt of this is mark of just how strong a film it is. The cast list alone puts it at the top: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy, Rowan Atkinson popping in for a bit…EMMA THOMPSON! The raw power of Emma Thompson quietly weeping as she listens to Joni Mitchell and contemplates the implosion of her marriage is stunning to behold. At its heart, it is a simple Richard Curtis film; it wants the viewer to relax in the beautiful spectacle of love, and to know that they are loved. I love Love Actually, and Love Actually loves me.

EMMA THOMPSON!

Article

Culture

Sport

Wildness

23 January 2025

4 min read

The surfers seeking the stoke of cold water enchantment

The reverence of waves breaks over beach-bums and ancient monks alike.

Riley Ellis

Riley is a writer and journalist, originally from Oregon.

A sufer carries a longboard into the waves

Surfing Oregon's coast.

Megan Nixon on Unsplash.

Long before Malibu or the post-industrial North Shore of Oahu, surfing held an integral role in Pacific Island societies. As Ben Finney and James Houston explain, surfing was a religious practice for ancient Hawaiians. With stocks of morning glory, they lashed the ocean’s surface, chanting “Arise, great surfs from Kahiki.” This compelled the spirits - animating the swells - to foster good waves, therefore good “stoke” (to use a modern idiom).

When I first started to surf, I detected such enchantment. Almost nothing brought me closer to transcendence. On good days, my Sabbath rituals would be galvanized by peeling waves paired with a cold saltwater plunge, somewhat like those Russian Orthodox plunges on January 6th (minus the ice).

And despite the rapid secularization of the West, surfing remains a precious religious ritual. For Christians, Buddhists, New Age spiritualists, etc.—anyone who meets the ocean on her own terms. All speak with reverence about the waves.

Surfers tend to be deeply serious people, distanced from their hash-smoking, dread-headed depictions in pop culture. Some might argue that they take themselves too seriously, one day conducting American counterculture and the next protesting the Vietnam War on the grounds that war disrupts the proverbial Tao.

Such is the genius of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic surfing motif from the film Apocalypse Now. Here, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, trying to find a rational explanation for the Vietnam War, declares “Charlie don’t surf!” with an odd tone of vulnerable bravado. Somewhere in this declaration, we find a longing for peace and transcendence, despite the chorus of machine guns and napalm that inevitably follow. For him, surfing was an antidote to chaos—a sort of victorious peace ritual following the horrors of battle.

Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby.

Jaimal Yogis, author of Saltwater Buddha, forthrightly connects surfing to enlightenment. In Hawaii, he studied dharma and traditional philosophy, living like Jack Kerouac and Kelly Slater combined: “[mastering] all the waves (internal and external).” There exist many paths to enlightenment, Yogis adds in his follow-up A Surfer’s Guide to Buddhism. Surfing is just one route through the ocean of suffering, albeit more appealing than ancient asceticism.

Surfing, Peter Kreeft claims, is akin to Buddhism in that they both contain unique words for their unique “highs”: ‘stoke’ and Nirvana. In a little book called I Surf, Therefore I Am, Kreeft regards surfers as Aristotelian disciples, chasing life’s greatest good (happiness) before anything else. In that respect, surfers live truthfully to the Ethics.

The activity of surfing, he says, transports a person into timeless happiness. ‘Stoke’ is a mystical ebullience, ecstasy of a sacred kind because ‘stoke’ is not a fleeting thing. It sustains itself both during and after the activity which creates it––a pure and lasting joy. “Maybe surfing brings us back to the timelessness of Eden,” Kreeft says.

Ancient Celtic monks found the seashore ideal for spiritual refuge, regarding their pilgrimage to the sea as following Christ into the desert. Visiting the ruins of one of these seaside monasteries, Dr. Ed Newell (author of The Sacramental Sea), felt himself overcome by its solitude. The ascetic life on the isle of Papa Stronsay seemed spiritually claustrophobic, he says.

These monks were not surfers (to our knowledge). They were beach bums. They recognized a simple, solemn truth about the sea: its intense solitude. Despite the chaos––constant chorus of swells and seagull cries––the ocean remains noiseless in a spiritual sense. She quiets anyone nearby, leaving them, as Kierkegaard puts it, silent and “nothing before God.” If we can learn from the lilies and the birds then surely waves and pelicans offer similar wisdom.

When I moved away from the coast for school, this was the most intense realization. Now, my life is full of constant noise. I thirst for that vast silence that nourished me back home. And while Kreeft is right, that ‘stoke’ never truly dissolves, adjusting to life away from the waves has been a terrible trial. During the first week in the dorms, the thought of rolling swells kept me awake and staring at the ceiling. I would instinctively open my window, only to realize that there was no distant sound of crashing waves to put me to sleep. There was, and has been, something dislodged ever since leaving the sea.

And so, today, I skipped class and stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. A fierce storm – bearing the name La Ninia – raged across the Oregon Coast. Sideways rain pelted my face. Though coated in a 5mm wetsuit, my fingers were already painfully numb before stepping into the sea, which was probably 5°-10°C.

I paddled past the breaking waves and rediscovered what was missing. The part of myself that never made it to university. I ditched my nine-foot fiberglass longboard for a moment and thought about nothing: floating, staring into the blankness of the gray sky. My body went numb and became weightless, the existential burdens vacating with each rise and fall of the swell. Once again, I was alone and silent before God. And despite losing myself in the vastness––the overwhelming silence––of that moment, I found myself entirely.

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