Santa’s Suggestions

Crammed indoors with your family for prolonged periods. Tensions running high. An increasingly inescapable sense of claustrophobia looms as passive aggression gradually drops any pretence of passivity and verges into outright confrontation. Nevertheless, the frankly bonkers world outside the door is even less inviting. Routine visits to shops have become intimidating exercises in crowd management and proximity paranoia, store workers frazzled, ransacked shelves half empty... Experts assure us this is a temporary situation. Normal life will resume in due course. You just have to get through it. We all do.
So you stay in and you binge. Ohhhh how you binge. If your mouth doesn't have a dig at a family member coming out of it, it's got alcohol or food going in. You'll get back to the gym when the dust's settled you tell yourself. “It's probably closed right now anyway” you tell yourself. “It's out of my hands” you tell yourself.... Those hands are opening a second tub of Pringles. “It's not my fault; once I 'popped'...”

...And your eyeballs are hungrier than ever. Starved of their normal diet outside the house - daylight, the park, beach, factory, office or worksite... Anyone who doesn't share your DNA or your bed - they go seeking easy prey. Thank God for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, Disney +....
You haven't seen your closest friends in ages. They're similarly hunkered down with their nearest and (increasingly questionably) dearest. What would we have done a few years back to pass a time like this together with some semblance of unity? Conversation?!? Boardgames probably. Fuck me. There's not enough alcohol in the house to make Charades bearable. No, you're going to follow your instincts on this one. Screens have it.

STAY ALERT ► CONTROL THE REMOTE ► SAVE SANITY. 

...but then some of us enjoy the Christmas holidays, or “Lockdown, with tinsel.”

Pre on-demand TV, Christmas scheduling was a highlight of the year, especially for those who grew up with just four terrestrial channels. (Channel 5 came out when I was 15 but our area didn't get reception so I missed out on a plethora of mediocre erotic thrillers that would've been catnip to me and my particular demographic. Instead my friends and I had to make do with borrowing James Gaunt's VHS copy of Basic Instinct but it got passed round school so much it went fuzzy on all the racy bits...)

Christmas was when the programmers pulled their finger out and actually put stuff worth watching on, including films which had in some cases, been released in cinemas just three or four years earlier. You could crawl out of bed on Christmas Eve, catch a James Bond accompanied by smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, followed by The Goonies, apple pie and ice cream, an hour-long Xmas Eastenders with your gammon and Iceland canapés, rolling straight into Terminator 2 and a late-night cheeseboard. You'd traipse to bed, exhausted, stuffed, giddy at the thought of doing it all again tomorrow (but with added PRESENTS!) and ready to dream about a tux-wearing, Martini-drinking Santa Claus's desperate last stand against an army of unstoppable pirate-cyborgs from the future. “Unstoppable” that is until the Mitchell brothers turn up, all red and round and bald and just start NUTTING everyone!!.... Christmas was the BEST!

With today's smart phones, smart TV's, tablets and lightning fast broadband, streaming has become the unrivalled norm for home entertainment and every day is effectively Christmas. Whether you've been good and paid your subscription or bad and hit the dodgy pirating sites, classic films, award-winning drama or latest releases - you can watch whatever's on your list day in, day out. Whilst that's great, if every day's Christmas, then what makes Christmas special? Where once the prestige broadcasting peppered with that Coca-cola ad with the lorries (“Holidays are coming, holidays are...”) unquestionably told us something special was afoot, today we increasingly curate our own content (with a little 'help' from the algorithms), so the onus is on us now to inject a little holiday spirit into proceedings, lest Christmas becomes just the food and presents.... and, errr, family togetherness, peace and good will or whatever.
To help, here's three Christmas crackers you simply have to (re)watch this year.   

Home Alone – The very essence of Christmas. An ode to uninhibited juvenile freedom and familial sentimentality... with a heavy dose of looney tunes violence. It's wish fulfilment for kids. My kind, gentle, nearly-five year old watched it last week and laughed like a lunatic when the silly man got hit in the face with an iron... I've now hidden our iron.
Featuring Joe Pesci and the late John Candy in fine form, it's the movie that put Macaulay Culkin on the map. He later fell off the map quite hard.... then sold the map to buy drugs.

Gremlins – Everyone's favourite light-dodging troublemakers, this 1984 classic was the first produced under Spielberg's Amblin studio banner and heralded the dawn of the PG-13 rating as a necessary halfway house between kid-friendly PG and “definitely bloody not”, R. Whilst the great bearded one successfully toned down far darker elements of director Joe Dante's bloody first draft, the finished film still earned that 13 appendix with numerous scenes of horror, violence and general chaos. The performances and practical creature effects are still top notch and the anti-capitalist messaging refreshingly subversive in a Christmas offering.... Plus Gizmo!

Die Hard – The quintessential Christmas movie, even if star Bruce Willis says in interviews it's not a Christmas movie. He's so grumpy these day he probably doesn't celebrate Christmas. If it's not a Christmas movie, why did he write “HO HO HO” on that terrorists jumper just after killing him and taking his machine gun? It doesn't get more Christmassy than writing “HO HO HO”.... on a dead terrorist. Whichever side you fall on the argument, it's a taut, sublimely executed action thriller with Willis pitch perfect as the reluctant hero dogging Alan Rickman's scenery chewing bad guy... at Christmas. 

Yippee-Ki-yay Motherfuckers..... and a happy new year.xxx

Ian Greenland