The Reel Diaries: White Christmas

"Vermont must be beautiful this time of year...all that snow!"

Welcome to The 90-Minute Movie. The Reel Diaries is a new monthly segment about “life-changing” movies.

I have a secret to tell you. I may come off as someone with a depth of film knowledge but in reality, I’ve never appreciated “old” movies in the way that I should. And it isn’t for lack of exposure or lack of trying. Growing up my mother was adamant about screening classics for us. Like all kids, I was partial to our Disney clamshells but I still strove to understand their meaning and importance even though it always felt just out of grasp.

There were many Sundays spent watching movies like The Ten Commandments, Gone with the Wind, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. These epic, sweeping films took us all afternoon to watch, and even now I can feel the warm glow of the setting sun in our Western facing windows. It’s so palpable that an intense feeling of melancholy washes over me whenever I see the glow of that same sun, 25 years later, as it warms the buildings across from my apartment.

Me at 10 trying to make sense of this movie

But despite all this viewing, I never felt connected to any of the films like I did with more contemporary pieces. Old movies felt like stage plays to me. Beautiful and picturesque, but not something I could emotionally attach myself to or rely on to make me feel less lonely. I spent most of college thinking the students who romanticized these films were totally full of shit. (Part of me still thinks they are totally full of shit.) I struggled to understand and enjoy the mid-Atlantic accents, the euphemisms, the steadiness and steadfastness of the cameras.

But like with all things, there was an exception. A film that crept into my heart over time and without me knowing it. Like trying lobster or grapefruit or whiskey again and again to “develop a taste for it”, 1954’s White Christmas snuck its way into my life subtlety and without grandeur. A Trojan horse for the studio era of filmmaking. By the time my early twenties rolled around it had become one of my favorites. Something I had to watch every year with my mom. It’s not lost on me that this around the time that I moved to New York City on my own and was getting my first taste of what life was going to be like. I was overwhelmed and lonely and found comfort in childhood traditions. I quickly came to prefer the Technicolor blues and reds, the perfectly coiffed hair, the sets obviously and safely built on a soundstage. I needed it. White Christmas was anti-anxiety, plus my mother and I agreed on it which also made it pacifying.

Because of the way White Christmas built upon itself every year, becoming more and more important to my relationship with my mother and our rituals, I can’t remember the first time I saw it. I probably disliked it. I probably fell asleep on the floor in front of our fireplace waking just enough times to say, “Oh yeah, mhm”, as my mom asked me questions about it. I maybe thought I’d never have to see it again. Or considered its runtime at only two hours (a major classic movie win) and agreed it would be a great one to watch every year. I’m not sure. But what I am sure of is one early memory in particular.

I am sick with the flu on Christmas Eve, tucked into my parents bed beside my mother who is also sick. The house is quiet, a rarity, because my two brothers and father are with relatives. In Polish you call the night before Christmas “Wigilia”, and Mom and I have asked the boys to bring back pierogis and chrusciki for us to feast upon even though I’ve had trouble holding down rice and water all week. I know for pierogi I will find a way.

The house is dark but all the Christmas lights are on. The little plastic taper candles in each window in my parents’ bedroom emit a warming light across the tiny snow crystals clinging to the other side of the glass. To my right and to my mother’s left are beside tables littered with mugs and cups of fluids of all kinds. My throat feels raw and my face hot, as mom crawls back into bed after starting the movie. The TV is wide and hulking on her dresser as they were in those days. She gives her heated blanket a couple other clicks warmer as the opening credits come up.

“It makes me so happy you love this movie,” she says.

And it feels so good to be sharing something private with her, in this world of work and my brothers, it’s something just for us.

“I do!” I say even if maybe at that age I don’t believe it yet. I was eating the lobster, drinking the whiskey, hoping I’d understand it one day soon.

It is days like this that cemented White Christmas into my list of favorite (albeit problematic) favorite movies.

Our love for this movie has grown and changed over the years. It has now become something we joke about as we watch its dated language and viewpoints. We jeer as though we’re a Mystery Science Theater panel for wartime flicks. We chatter through out, talking about the dresses, the lives of the actors, the creepy age gap between Bing Crosby’s Bob Wallace and Rosemary Clooney’s Betty Haynes. (When they filmed the movie, he was 51 and she was 25.) It is now an event.

Mom and me preparing for another wine-fueled viewing sesh

The picture managed to find its way into some drunken nights of my twenties. One particular viewing occurred during a sloppy Thanksgiving when my mom had come to visit me in New York City. We spent the day at a Mexican spot in Union Square with my friend Justin, going through many pitchers of margaritas until the sun set. Arriving back at my apartment uptown we hastily decided that tradition must prevail and so we let White Christmas play on mute while we danced around my small living room to hip-hop music. I can see the glow of the TV against our clothes as we spin around on the rag rug. And my dog scurrying beneath our feet, barking at our worst moves. It is a reminder that traditions needn’t be formulaic, and that they can grow and change with us.

I am now at the point in my life that I cannot experience a Christmas season without watching White Christmas, and preferably with my mom so we can shout out all our favorite lines, and tease our favorite characters for their shortcomings (and there are so many). Our obsessive dedication to this movie made 70 years ago, before either of us were even born, has paid off in some ways. During those long weeks of the first COVID winter when it was impossible to see one another, White Christmas was there to make us feel closer. And that is all we ask of it now, not be the best but to be simply be there for us. Consistency.