Dusting off a well-loved copy of your favorite Christmas movie is one of the holiday season’s greatest pleasures. With all the best Christmas memories preserved on DVD’s or streaming online, it’s become easy for holiday lovers to recreate their favorite seasonal moments: Just pop on your favorite holiday film! But why don’t people branch out and enjoy new Christmas movies? Filmmakers create new material every year, and arguably improve upon a beloved formula. However, modern Christmas movies will never have prestige like the films from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, because as a society, we’re not ready to let go of Christmas past.
The holiday season is already an extremely emotional and nostalgic time of year. As civilization strays further into an unpredictable future, folks crave the golden glow of bygone eras when things seemed simpler, more fulfilled, and predictably merry. Clinging to the past, audiences inadvertently leave top-tier modern films out in the cold, and instead choose movies they have already seen. Although new movies may deserve a rewatch of their own, every year they get crowded out by the nostalgia-driven classics that more effectively fuel the Christmas-themed daydream everyone craves.
