That is both literal and metaphorical.
At the moment we have as many as a dozen people spending a significant portion of every day in our house, three of them under the age of 12. The reason for this gathering is sad, but we the people are doing our best to be happy. That's all I can really say out of a sense of privacy for my family. I'll just say that it does not involve the health of any of the immediate three members of my family, or me.
As a result of this thing and of the crazy year I've had at work, my movie viewings have taken an absolute nosedive. Just to give you some idea of that, I've seen only 13 new movies in 24 days of the month so far. That would be plenty for your average person, but for me, it's pretty low. We aren't to the end of the month yet, so a full comparison is not yet possible, but I saw 29 movies in December of 2024. I no longer have to worry about shattering my 2024 ranking record of 177 movies.
I did, however, finally see my first Christmas movie -- and probably only new Christmas movie -- on December 23rd.
It wasn't the greatest 2025 Christmas debut, but hey, I still have Christmas Eve to wash the taste out of my mouth.
That's the thing I find most unpleasant about most new Christmas movies, of which Michael Showalter's Oh. What. Fun. is a particular exemplar: their chintzy taste and general sense of garishness. This poster gives you some idea.
When you watch a movie set in and around Christmas these days -- the Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane is another example -- the production designers have left things so chockablock with Christmas paraphernalia that you literally don't have a shot in the movie without a gaudy lawn ornament or a bad Christmas sweater somewhere in it.
And though this is, in most movies, supposed to be at least partly a commentary on the crass commercialization of Christmas, it's us who have to spend our time immersed in this space. And at a time of year when we are feeling frenzied because of our own responsibilities, it hardly feels like a relaxing way to spend our downtime, further assaulted by the colors red and green and just reminding ourselves of the present we haven't yet wrapped and the complicated toy we haven't yet constructed.
Oh. What. Fun. is supposed to be a distiff Christmas movie in that it styles itself as focusing on the mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) rather than the dad (in this case, Denis Leary), as every other Christmas movie in the past does. In fact, as part of the extremely meta and self-aware setup of this film, Pfeiffer even narrates as much as she goes through a literal shelf of VHS tapes of all these other movies focused on the harried dad at Christmas. The most instructive example for the structure of this film is probably National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I also don't care for.
But because it's Christmas Eve, and it's been a very hard year, I don't really want to leave you with a glass of curdled egg nog on my blog, especially if I don't get a chance to write about the movie I hope to watch tonight -- and with all these people around our house, I don't know if I will.
I will say that I missed the opportunity to watch Home Alone yesterday with this big group of people, as they did it during the last hour of my workday. That would have been nice, though it isn't a personal favorite of mine and I may have seen it only twice.
So if you get the chance, treat yourself to a Christmas classic over the next few days -- even if it is about a harried dad -- and leave some of these newcomers unwrapped.
Merry Christmas all.
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