Every year, my friends and I watch as many Christmas movies as we can between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We have an elaborate system to nominate and veto movies until we have three movies to choose from, then we vote for our favorite.
It gets pretty crazy with people forming alliances and using complicated strategies to watch the movie they want, and we spend a lot of time arguing about what constitutes a “Christmas movie” (Die Hard is a Christmas movie, Die Hard 2 is not).
Here’s how it works…
The group nominates three movies. Each person can nominate one movie. Each person also gets one veto—they can veto any movie that’s already been nominated, and they must replace that movie with another nomination.
Once there are three nominations and no more vetos, we all vote for our favorite. The movie with the most votes wins. If there’s a tie, then there’s usually some campaigning before we re-vote for the movies that tied. If there’s still a tie, I think we flip a coin or something.
If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is: Sometimes the nomination process is as long as the movie we choose.
We’ve already had four movie nights and my guess is we’ll have five or six more before Christmas. Here are the movies we’ve watched so far this year:
- Better Watch Out – Is this a Christmas movie? There were…disagreements.
- Home Alone 2: Lost in New York – One of the best Christmas movies.
- Trading Places – Yes, the one about trading pork bellies. No, this isn’t really a Christmas movie—turns out the TV version is quite a bit different than the full version.
- Jingle all the Way – What’s not to like about a Christmas movie starring The Governator?
- Christmas Vacation – Chevy Chase at his best, and a timeless movie that gets better with time.
- Home Alone – The quintessential Christmas movie.
- The Santa Clause – A solid Christmas movie with one of my favorite Christmas movie characters: Neil.
A pretty good lineup, but we still haven’t watched my favorite…
There’s just something about Clark Griswold’s dogged determination to have a Merry Christmas despite the universe conspiring against him at every turn. Hopefully I’ll get this one on the list while there’s still time.
And I’m still hoping for It’s a Wonderful Life and Home Alone this year.
UPDATE (12/19/2017): We have watched a few more movies since I originally posted this, so I’ve added them to the list above. We’ve had a really solid lineup so far this year!
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