Forget all that rubbish about eggnog and ice skating and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. As a committed Christmas urbanite, my favourite place to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ is at that secular temple of wonder and commercial enterprise - the movies.
My mother started the tradition when I was a teenager. Every year around mid-December she'd clap her hands and say brightly, "Let's have a Jewish Christmas this year!" Except what she actually meant was, "I don't feel like shopping for presents or cooking a turkey, so can we just catch the latest Die Hard sequel and go for dim sum instead?"
And so we created what I like to call a JeWASP Christmas tradition: We'd cook a turkey, drink mulled wine, give each other presents we didn't like but were too polite to return and finally, when we got bored with overeating and bickering, we went to see a film.
I've always been entranced by the fact that in most major urban centres, movie theatres stay open over Christmas. Not only do cinemas offer a respite for the lonely (a kind of holiday soup kitchen for the orphaned and estranged middle class), they are also a great comfort for those of us who have an intense need to spend time with our families and simultaneously to escape them.
The trouble, of course, is what to watch. A movie can make or break the Christmas spirit, so it must be chosen with care and consideration. With this in mind, I have consulted a small, hand-picked panel of Canadian Christmas Movie Experts, who have kindly offered the following advice:
1. Sarah Polley: Dreaming of a white corset
Around this time of year, the Oscar-nominated writer/director/actress told me she gets a hankering to watch something with a "really lush production design and sip hot chocolate," and cited Shakespeare in Love as a perfect Christmas guilty-pleasure past. For her, December is devoted to any and all period pieces. "Something rich to look at somehow makes you feel warmer," she explained, "Then I avoid period movies at all costs for the rest of the year lest they plummet me back into the years of my misspent youth." Polley's best bet for this holiday season? Likely The King's Speech with the always delectable Colin Firth.
2. Cameron Bailey: Go big or go home
As recently anointed co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival, Bailey is known for his eclectic, international taste in cinema, but when it comes to Christmas movies, he's all about the bling. This season boasts a handful of boffo budgets, including Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia or the romcom How Do You Know - all of which cost in the hundreds of millions. According to Bailey, the ideal holiday flick "looks expensive as hell on the big screen, because Christmas is a time for giving, and I want Hollywood to give me everything it's got." As for running length? He says anything over two hours is preferable "since inevitably you emerge afterward into a cold, winter anti-climax."
3. Kathryn Borel Jr.: In with the old, out with the new
Just in case you get snowed in or can't be bothered to leave the house this Christmas, memoirist and screenwriter Borel (who recently relocated to Los Angeles) advises you to choose a DVD from the film canon rather than a new release since, "chances are, if your family has diverse and ranging interests, you've probably done a lot of bickering throughout the holidays due to basic exposure. You won't be in the mood to continue that kind of bickering into the arena of film criticism, because that can get intellectually wanky." Her own family had a time-honoured tradition of getting tipsy and watching Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull every Christmas, which she admits was somewhat intense after a long day of gorging on food and gifts. Nonetheless, she provides the following recommendations for "vaguely recent though classic bummer" films: Schindler's List, Philadelphia and the Shawshank Redemption.
4. Ken Finkleman: Get primal
So I asked the brilliant (and somewhat eccentric) writer-director for his advice on choosing a Christmas flick and he didn't exactly answer my question. But what he did say was this: "When I was a kid in Winnipeg, we went to movies on Christmas Day because that was something Jews did. It's in the Talmud. I suggest Planet of the Apes if you can find it."
5. Corey Mintz: Go for the grit
A Toronto-based food writer and lifelong movie buff, Mintz also has the strange distinction of being the former film critic for my high-school newspaper. Like Finkleman, Mintz noted that, "Aside from having a bar mitzvah and complaining that the soup isn't hot enough, there's nothing more Jewish than going to the movies on Christmas Day." He went on to mention both Jackie Brown and Life Aquatic as great Christmas movies past. This year, Mintz has narrowed it down to four options: "David O. Russell's track record suggests that The Fighter is likely to be good, but misery-inducing," he mulled in an e-mail. "The Tron sequel has too much potential for suckitude. The Illusionist just might be great. But True Grit, a remake of a mediocre movie by talented directors, is just unambitious enough to hit the spot."
I reckon he's in for a very merry Christmas movie experience.