But when it happens accidentally, well, there's not a lot I can do about that.
This was the case with The Baltimorons, my penultimate viewing of 2025 before I post my rankings early Friday morning my time. I was already committed to my $5.99 rental by the time I was ushered in to the movie by the familiar sounds of what sounded like the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Tannenbaum" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Looking it up online, I can see that this was just composer Jordan Seigel's loving homage/ripoff of Guaraldi.)
There were two reasons I had to doubt/never consider that The Baltimorons might be a Christmas movie:
1) The title. It wasn't A Baltimorons Christmas or Jingle Balts or something that would have given it away.
2) The release date. When I looked it up on IMDB to confirm its eligibility for 2025 -- this being a movie I only recently realized I should watch, it being directed by a Duplass brother -- I saw that it had hit U.S. theaters on September 5th. The second half of the year, at least, but not otherwise within the logical range of releasing it in conjunction with the holiday.
Of course, if I'd actually read its synopsis, I would have been set straight: "A newly sober man's Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected romance with his older dentist as they explore Baltimore together."
I guess in the end I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have skipped it and then might have continued skipping it in perpetuity. When December rolls around each year, we tend to watch new Christmas movies and classic Christmas movies, rarely seeking out the middle ground between the two.
But it wasn't only liking the movie enough to be glad I'd seen it. It was that I happened to also be taking down our Christmas tree last night, so it seemed appropriate.
Yes in my house we keep our Christmas tree up for most of January. Traditionally we don't take it down until Australia Day, which is next Monday, but I'm starting early this year. I'm giving up the ghost on Christmas. My wife is out of town and has been so all month, tending to a family matter. She won't be back by Australia Day, so unless she reads this, she won't even know I took it down early -- nor will she care. But it's been dead for several weeks now and in the Australian summer, that becomes a fire hazard.
I was slow-walking the undecorating. I'd started it the day before, but then got distracted by another household chore, since I'm doing all of them myself at this point. (I'm not bothering to make my kids help me with them. Let them have their summer.) But I resumed last night while watching the Australian Open, and soon I'd gotten all the ornaments I could see removed from the tree. In order to help see them better, I turned on the Christmas lights for the first time in probably two weeks.
That looks nice, I thought.
So I didn't unstring the nights, deciding I'd let them illuminate my second-to-last viewing of 2025, whatever it might be.
And of course it ended up being a Christmas movie. I felt the coziness of the holiday there in my living room, even on January 19th.
And it's kind of nice that the Michelle Pfeiffer film Oh. What. Fun. is not the only new Christmas movie I watched in 2025. That one was forgettable, or rather, bad enough to be memorable, which is probably worse. It didn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling.
This one did, and I'll take it, even on January 19th.
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