Twitter Erupts Over Clay’s Four Favorite Christmas Movies

CLAY: The way that I would define my favorite Christmas movies is when they come on, you know, if I’m walking through the house in the Christmas season and one of my kids is watching it or one of my relatives is watching it, will I stop, maybe sit down, and watch at least five or 10 minutes of the movie? All four of these the answer is “yes.” All right?

A Christmas Story. Came out in 1983. Usually I think TBS does A Christmas Story marathon. I absolutely love Ralphie and his pursuit of his little Red Ryder BB gun. I love everything about this movie. Set in 1950s, if I believe I am correct, Cleveland, everything about that movie to me is a work of art, every little different segment. I love every aspect of it. I loved it as a kid, and now I love it as a parent. It’s one of those great movies that you can age with where early on when you’re a kid and you remember watching it, you see it through the eyes of the kids and it’s well done and you enjoy it. And then as you get older, you start to see it through the eyes of the parents because you have your own kids.

I’m sure for a lot of these movies that can be true, where you can experience everything. One of the great things about aging and why I think with aging you have more wisdom is because you can see it through the eyes of everyone, right, in theory, by the time you’re Grandma or Grandpa you can see Christmas through the eyes of the kids because you can remember what it was like to be a kid for Christmas. You can see it through the eyes of the teenagers, college-age kids, 20-somethings, and then also from the parents’ perspective, and then finally from the grandparents’ perspective you have seen it all, you can see it through everybody’s eyes. A Christmas Story, one of my four on the list.

Home Alone. Now, they just did Home Alone like kind of a recap, and I think it was on — was it on Netflix? I watched it with my boys, where they had Buzz, who was the big brother — by the way, Buzz just got arrested in real life, the big brother, if you watched Home Alone, that was bullying Kevin McCallister, who was the kid who gets left Home Alone.

And I know there are monster plot issues with Home Alone that become more glaring and more readily apparent as you age yourself and you think, I don’t know really that I buy that this kid would have ever been Home Alone for very long at all, certainly in a modern technological age it’s hard to believe ’cause he would have an iPad but — maybe an iPhone. But Home Alone is on my list.

Christmas Vacation. The original Vacation movie, European Vacation also great. They brought in two brand-new kids and made ’em kids again. Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo is absolutely phenomenal, Cousin Eddie, the lights, Christmas Vacation is absolutely incredible.

And then Ali on our staff, this was her favorite, my kids love it, the Will Ferrell Elf movie, those are the four that I think are the best, okay?

I understand that my list maybe a bit younger than other people’s list because I’m 42 and all of these movies are around especially A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and Christmas Vacation, the 1980s. I think Christmas Vacation was 1990, if I’m not mistaken or close to it. These are movies that I grew up watching myself, and then Elf, obviously, is a more recent vintage movie.

Again there was a massive battle royale in the comments section of people fighting it out over what their favorite movie is. Christmas Vacation dominated the votes over the 32,000 people who voted in this — of those four. Christmas Vacation, followed by Home Alone, followed by Elf, followed by A Christmas Story was the perspective of the voters themselves.