CHRISTMAS

"... isn't just a day; it's a frame of mind."

— Edmund Gwenn, Miracle on 34th Street

"The mother of all holidays" is how Jean Shepherd put it in his narration of A Christmas Story, and it's true enough-but Christmas is also the year's most demanding day (or fortnight, really) in terms of atmosphere, emotional temperature, and point of view. We don't feel a need to get all colonial or even terribly grateful on Thanksgiving; nobody talks about "getting into the spirit" of Mother's Day, Veterans Day, or even Independence Day. But for Christmas, there is a pervasive compulsion to summon reserves of tolerance, generosity, congeniality, and childlike optimism, and we go to extraordinary cultural lengths to make it happen. Hence, the phenomenon known as the Christmas movie. Films that fall into this category serve as narrative windows into that Edenic space in which cold hearts are warmed, charitable love dawns on the greedy, and, most of all, childhood memories and the purest notions of home become easier to grasp and hold. Old movies-those more closely linked to the idealized past from which all adult ardor for the holiday flows-are best; crassly commercial contemporary parables about crass commercialism (Jingle All the Way, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Christmas with the Kranks, to name a few) are not, and we've largely left them behind. The season is short, after all.

The Night Before Christmas (1905) This fabulously arthritic Edison production from the infancy of film history — directed by narrative pioneer Edwin S. Porter — is a dusty dream of Victorian faerieism, opening with Santa feeding a herd of real reindeer and teeming with antiquey landscape paintings and pretechnological toys. It's also the climactic short on Kino's DVD A Christmas Past, a collection of silent vintage holiday films that includes D. W. Griffith's fiercely moralistic A Trap for Santa (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking A Winter Straw Ride (1906), and Santa Claus (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers. A hypnotic time capsule and an effective premodern weapon in the war against shopping and accumulation for their own sakes.

Scrooge (1935) It's a tiring parable, but Charles Dickens's chestnut A Christmas Carol is, in one form or another, all but unavoidable. Preachy, sure, but it's such an overused story that you can hardly watch an hour of November television without being pelted by a commercial's reference to it. Better to go to the source — the book! — or to this first sound version, British-made, starring stage vet Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. A creaky, attic-webby beaut, choked with shadow and fog.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940) A fiercely odd septuagenarian Christmas tale cowritten by Mildred Cram, the author of Love Affair, this forgotten dilly concerns three bachelor fogies (buoyant Charles Winninger, crusty yet affable C. Aubrey Smith, dyspeptic Harry Carey Sr.) who die and return as ghosts to facilitate the seemingly doomed romance of a pair of young 'uns. The star power of these three character actors alone makes it worth seeking out, but the story is also a fabulous lark. Sometimes retitled Beyond Christmas.

Remember the Night (1940) An overlooked screwball masterpiece from Hollywood's golden age, written by bad-boy satiric genius Preston Sturges and directed by beloved "woman's director" Mitchell Leisen, in which whimsical bachelor DA Fred MacMurray takes sexy shoplifting tramp Barbara Stanwyck with him to his homestead for Christmas. Sturges's dialogue, volleyed by these pros four years before Double Indemnity, is mint, but the idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy. The film is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate, and Sturges's fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film. The characters' feet are planted in the real world, and the season's triumph is rescue from the memory of a poisoned childhood.

Holiday Inn (1942) Possibly the best movie to watch while wrapping presents. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are a pair of showmen who decide to open a country inn that celebrates every holiday with song and dance. That's it for story. As you'd expect, most of the film is caught up with other seasonal occasions; Christmas is just one page on the calendar. It just so happens that the movie's endearingly canned studio "winter" and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" are the most memorable things about the film. That's fine:...