Sometimes if I’m working late, I put on mindless television in the background. On a recent Friday night without plans, I did that, and since it’s December I figured I might as well make it festive. I put on Christmas With The Kranks which I’ve seen probably at least 5 times already, and then Four Christmases, which I may have only seen once and not all the way through.
But this time, watching these relics of the 2000s, they took on new meaning.
Behind a cheesy script and slapstick comedy, each explained the tradeoff of convention for convenience in both platonic and romantic relationships.
Christmas With The Kranks is about a couple of empty nesters with an only child that they adore who goes off to join the Peace Corps. Ahead of their first Christmas without their daughter, the husband suggests they forego the holiday altogether this year, and opt for a Caribbean cruise instead.
Christmas is a big deal where they live, and their neighbors go apoplectic at the idea of their withdrawal, constantly pressuring them to participate in the festivities. They’re in somewhat of a Cold War, with the community escalating in their hostility and the couple digging their heels in until they get a surprise call from their daughter informing them she’s on her way back to celebrate with them.
With just hours to spare, they’re forced to get a tree, decorate both the exterior and interior of their home, grocery shop, cook, prep, and pull together their annual Christmas Eve party.
If you’ve ever hosted – especially for a Christmas party – you know this is no casual feat.
The neighbors they’ve been feuding with for weeks pitch in without a second thought.
It’s actually an incredible case study on the village and the villager and all that’s been lost over the past decade and a half.
If you watch the movie, it’s obvious that the neighbors are being unreasonable. They seem unhinged, intrusive and completely over-invested in this couple’s choices.
But as it’s been said so many times before, inconvenience is the price we pay for community.
The neighbors inconvenienced the couple, harassing them about Christmas activities – and the couple inconvenienced their neighborhood the night before Christmas. And the neighbors dropped their own plans to make a miracle happen, expecting nothing in return.
The same instinct that had people so obsessed with their participation is the same one that drove them to help when they were needed, and I don’t know that we can separate the two; try as we might.
It seems like this movie was ahead of its time to an extent, trying to warn against an oncoming phenomenon.
At both the micro levels and the macro levels, we’ve gotten way too comfortable calling selfishness “self care,” and acting surprised as we watch our sense of camaraderie crumble in real time.
Whether we’re protesting a cherished tradition among everyone we live with or cancelling plans last minute because our moods changed, it’s all a symptom of the same problem.
It leads to the collapse of connection, and we severely underestimate the real world cost.
I live in a neighborhood right now with no real sense of community. Or maybe there is one but I’m just not a part of it. The streets are constantly littered with trash. There are drug dealers and drug users roaming sporadically throughout the week. There’s no one on my block I’ve given a spare key to..
If I had to choose between my current reality and a paranoid retiree with too much time on her hands and a pair of binoculars, or getting a notice every time the grass in my yard grew over half an inch, or coordinated and strictly enforced Christmas decor, I’d choose the latter without a second thought.
Boomers have often been criticized as narcissistic and greedy because they’re spending money on vacations that they could be passing off to their kids and grandkids. And maybe that’s true, but if it is, I don’t know that there’s anything unique about it.
I think across generations, our hedonism, vanity and selfishness just manifest in different ways.
Four Christmases follows a stereotypical high-earning, highly educated, cosmopolitan couple with no intention of marriage or procreation, cohabitating and building their lives around career and leisure. They blame it in part on their parents’ divorces.
Every year since they’ve been together, they’ve purposefully avoided spending time with their families, opting instead for lavish getaways, telling their relatives they can’t be with them because they’re doing charity work. But this year, flight cancellations put an end to their ruse, forcing them to spend Christmas with their parents, siblings and in-laws, traveling to four dysfunctional households in one day.
Before the flight is even cancelled, the woman seems to be coming to the slow realization that her life has adopted the very repetition and mundanity she thought she was avoiding by refusing to settle down. The travel is starting to blend together, and she starts to wonder if scuba diving in Bali versus Fiji is really that different or adventurous.
As they journey to each home, they begin to realize they don’t know each other nearly as well as they thought they did, and begin coming to terms with the fact that true companionship can’t be sustained by dinner reservations and excursions.
That’s not to say that a couple without children can’t ever truly know each other, or that any relationship that involves children is automatically profound or more intimate. But the best relationships will be anchored in the eternal, in purpose and beyond gratification of self.
The woman is surrounded by children throughout the day. At the first house, she holds and comforts a crying infant before accidentally hitting her head on a cabinet. At the second house, an infant projectile vomits on her immediately after she checks their diaper and her rowdy niece steals her pregnancy test, leading to her battling a bouncy house full of kids to retrieve it. And even in the chaos, she begins to see the appeal.
Traveling to their families’ homes, the woman begins to realize that she actually does yearn for the very things she once dismissed. She wants real commitment, and she wants kids.
We’re all different, and I’m irritated by militant traditionalists that insist that starting a family is the only way to find any meaning in life.
Paul himself preached emphatically against this.
But there’s a difference between God calling you to something else and distracting yourself with frivolities or denying what most of us are naturally wired for.
In the car on the way to the last visit, the girlfriend admits to her boyfriend that when she took her pregnancy test earlier that day, a part of her wanted it to be positive. A part of her hoped that they’d just get over their fears and hang ups, and it dawned on her that real love doesn’t mean running from responsibility but towards it.
For the better part of the last 20 years, it seems like the vast majority of media has been intentionally designed to undermine the values that bring people together and closer to God.
It seems like everything is subtly encouraging us to serve ourselves, to avoid obligation, and to chase status more aggressively than we chase anything else.
But these 20 year old Christmas movies are the exception to the rule, and while they weren’t religious at all in their messaging, they offered a reminder to the American people about what actually mattered when so much coming out of Hollywood was trying to convince us it didn’t.
what do you think?