Most contemporary Christmas movies offer a pretty poor understanding of the holiday. As far as Hollywood is concerned, Christmas is an occasion to pray for the receipt of a new Red Ryder BB gun (A Christmas Story), to indulge in a schmaltzy romance (Love Actually), or to learn, in the blandest, broadest terms, a lesson about the importance of being a really nice person (various retellings of A Christmas Carol, including Scrooged). These movies are the artistic equivalents of the holiday lights which seem to appear on front lawns earlier each autumn: bright, sparkling objects that please the senses with their shininess but in no way reflect—or are even related to—the events that followed the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary: “Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus.”
Instead, movies such as Elf, The Santa Clause, and the recent Red One assume that children are more familiar with the alleged inhabitants of the North Pole than they are with Christ. (And because such movies are generally widely popular, that assumption is often not only correct but also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.) A movie lover like myself is compelled, then, to work backwards in time to find Christmas movies that display some understanding, however imperfect or incomplete, of the season. This means I end up watching an awful lot of Turner Classic Movies in December.
Although the cable channel has in general declined over the years, T.C.M., by virtue of its mandate to present classics from decades past, can still be counted upon for its Christmastime programming: Leo McCarey’s Bells of St. Mary’s, John Ford’s 3 Godfathers, Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis, the Preston Sturges-scripted Remember the Night, and so on. I make no assertions about the theological rigor or doctrinal purity of these flicks, but they have, if not a firm commitment to a Christian understanding of Christmas, a sense of the consequence of the day: When Jimmy Stewart at last persuades Margaret Sullavan that he is worthy of her affections at the end of Ernst Lubitsch’s Shop Around the Corner, the moment is heightened—in that the characters’ relationship is granted a kind of spiritual gravity—for taking place on Christmas Eve.
Some six Christmases ago, T.C.M. aired a Christmas movie that was essentially unknown to me but has since become my favorite: the 1952 British Lion production The Holly and the Ivy, starring Ralph Richardson, Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, and, decades before he assumed the guise of Marcus Brody in global archeological adventures, Denholm Elliott.
I should pause here for just a moment. Although the song that gives the film its title (and its theme music) is a British folk tune, I have for years, for my own reasons, associated it with the Lutheranism that my mother was raised in and which I, errant soul that I am, finally picked up in adulthood: I first heard the song “The Holly and the Ivy” in a version sung by Erin Bode, a gifted jazz vocalist whose father—here’s the connection—is a Lutheran pastor. I first discovered Bode while listening to an episode of A Prairie Home Companion. “It’s good to meet a jazz singer who knows ‘Children of the Heavenly Father,’” Garrison Keillor said of his guest, and right he was. Later, when Bode released her Christmas album A Cold December Night, I noted the simplicity and directness with which she sang “The Holly and the Ivy”: “And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet savior”—the words sung as though she was confessing their truth and not merely catching their tune.
I was primed, then, to have a favorable reaction to the movie The Holly and the Ivy, though I was unprepared for the depth of my response. The movie, based on a play by Wynyard Browne, has at its center a taciturn, sober-minded Church of England minister, the Reverend Martin Gregory (Richardson), who, since acquiring the unwelcome status of widower, shares his parsonage with one of his three grown children, Jenny (Johnson). Despite quickly approaching spinsterhood, Jenny shoulders this arrangement ungrudgingly, though the romantic entreaties of her beau David (John Gregson)—and the prospect of marrying him and joining him in a new life together overseas—offers an intriguing alternate possibility. David tells Jenny that parents must give way to their children or humanity itself wouldn’t survive, but she, perhaps in a manner too self-sacrificial, sees herself as bound by duty: “I’m the only one. I’ve got to stay.”
In the dark late hours of Christmas Eve, this moderately happy home is descended upon by family members of varying degrees of closeness, including Jenny’s siblings, the miserable urbanite Margaret (Leighton) and the military-conscripted Michael (Elliott). In the manner of a well-made play, two aunts offer contrasting visions of her future to Jenny: jolly Lydia (Margaret Halstan)—who, upon arriving at the Gregorys’ front door gleefully announces, apropos of the frigid temperature, “Siberia—it’s like Siberia!”—and surly Bridget (Maureen Delaney), who never took a husband and is judged the poorer for it. “She did what you’re thinking of doing: She stayed at home to look after your grandmother,” Lydia says, saddened over the fate of her relation: “If she died tomorrow it wouldn’t really make the slightest difference to anyone.” The director, George More O’Ferrall, while no Orson Welles, manages the pandemonium of family life with admirable authenticity and feeling.
Unwilling to leave her father unattended, Jenny ultimately prevails upon Margaret to care for him in her stead—thereby permitting Jenny to join David, and granting Margaret, who mothered a child outside of marriage and later lost him to illness, a sense of purpose. All of this might sound like the stuff of so many kitchen sink dramas—a form that Browne’s play precedes by some years—but the film holds true to a Christian understanding of vocation: Jenny, Margaret, and their father come to accept and inhabit the roles that God has ordained for them.
The Holly and the Ivy is enriched immeasurably by being set on Christmas Eve and Day, which not only provides plausible dramatic justification for the convergence of such a wide assortment of people but offers the prism through which to view Jenny’s situation. Early in the film, Jenny remarks on the extraordinary way that Christmas arrives so dramatically yet so discreetly each year—like a thief in the night, one might say.
“There’s something about Christmas morning,” Jenny says. “Somehow, I don’t know why I always know it’s Christmas morning. It’s as if during the night while you were asleep, something had happened.” The sudden, silent annual arrival of Christmas, then, anticipates the sharp, swift change in her life: things as simple as a family gathering, an airing of grievances, a reckoning with reality results in Jenny going from a minder of her father to a full participant in the pageant of her own existence. Majestic things happen in hushed silences.
I had an inkling of Jenny’s insight during the Christmas Eve when I was thirteen. From a dormer window of my family’s two-story brick house, I surveyed the luminaries that lined our front yard below. The light they emitted quivered quietly. I still remember what I thought: It was as if the world had momentarily wound down, but that something would happen—just as it did when a Savior was born.
Now that I think about it, maybe a better title for The Holly and the Ivy would have been “Silent Night,” but no matter what we call it, it is the Christmas movie to redeem all Christmas movies.
