Christmas Movies

 I see the British Board of Film Classification has conducted a poll to find the nation's favourite Christmas film. The results are pretty bizarre. I suppose if It's A Wonderful Life didn't exist, you might go for The Muppets Christmas Carol or Elf, or even, at a pinch, Home Alone – which in the event came top by a considerable margin – but mark what 'the nation' voted into the number two spot: Love Actually, one of the most powerful emetics in cinema history. Has the world gone mad? (Yes, of course it has, but what can you do?). 
As it happens, the other night I watched, on my son's recommendation, what turned out to be a very fine Christmas movie. This was The Holdovers, a comedy drama from 2023, directed by Alexander Payne and starring the great Paul Giamatti (whose performance as John Adams was one of the best I ever saw on TV). The Holdovers is set in 1970 at an upmarket boys' boarding school in Massachusetts, where Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a dedicated old-school classics teacher trying to uphold standards in an institution largely dedicated to raising money from rich parents and ensuring that even their stupidest sons never fail their exams. Hunham finds himself forced to stay behind through the Christmas break to supervise a handful of pupils who have nowhere to go, mostly because their parents don't want them around. This unhappy group soon dwindles to one – the unhappiest of them all, a troubled older boy called Angus Tully. The film follows the evolving relationship between Hunham and Tully and the black cafeteria manager  Mary Lamb, who has lost her son in Vietnam. As we learn more about these three, each of them in some way bereft, a fascinating drama (with plentiful moments of comedy) develops, one that kept me gripped through to the richly satisfying end – and with absolutely no Yuletide schmalz along the way. Highly recommended. 

Christmas Is Coming...

 December already, and Advent. I was in the cathedral yesterday for a candlelit ceremony of readings and music, including the Great 'O' Antiphons. The choir was on top form, creating some quite extraordinary harmonies; the cathedral was chock full; and the whole occasion was beautiful, numinous and joyful. I'll be back, at least for the Festival of Lessons and Carols. 

And meanwhile, in parallel with Advent, the Xmas juggernaut of consumer excess, which got under way at least a month ago, trundles on, more oppressive and dispiriting (at least to me) every year. Soon I shall be writing Christmas cards, one of the less irksome tasks of the season – and, as it happens, have just come across this apposite poem by the Midwestern poet Ted Kooser – 

Christmas Mail

Cards in each mailbox,

angel, manger, star and lamb,

as the rural carrier,

driving the snowy roads,

hears from her bundles

the plaintive bleating of sheep,

the shuffle of sandals,

the clopping of camels.

At stop after stop,

she opens the little tin door

and places deep in the shadows

the shepherds and wise men,

the donkeys lank and weary,

the cow who chews and muses.

And from her Styrofoam cup,

white as a star and perched

on the dashboard, leading her

ever into the distance,

there is a hint of hazelnut,

and then a touch of myrrh.

 

Kooser, who is still with us (in his 80s), is a poet I had not heard of before, a writer of short, accessible but subtle and very accomplished verse. His poems, to quote Dana Gioia, offer 'small but genuine insights into the world of everyday experience' and he makes no effort to court 'the specialised minority readership that now sustains poetry'. I'm going to be seeking out more of his work, and might well pass some of his poems on to the specialised minority readership that sustains Nigeness.