I recently found in a Queanbeyan charity shop a 1980 copy of The Night Before Christmas which I'm looking forward to reading to my one-year-old nephew on Christmas Eve. (I actually thought the book was older than that - 1980 sounds like yesterday - but it is 43 years ago, so practically vintage. Anyway, I digress.)
So, I expect my blond-haired, cherubic nephew to sit quietly and listen the whole way through the book and not wriggle off the couch 10 seconds in to go and try to pull another ornament off the Christmas tree ...Who am I kidding?! In any case, with a one-year-old in the house, Christmas will be nothing short of magical.
In a few years, like maybe ten, I look forward to introducing my little nephews to more of our Christmas traditions. Number one, watching Daddy's Home 2 on the night before Christmas. It's just not the festive season without it. We're a very traditional family.
So, Daddy's Home 2 might not be your first pick for a Christmas movie. It's not Elf (although we adore that) or Love, Actually or It's a Wonderful Life, but we love it because it's about families who are so perfectly imperfect. And it showcases the talents of the unlikely pairing of Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell. Together, they produce champagne comedy (Marky Mark is seriously under-rated as a comedic actor.)
The first movie Daddy's Home was about Brad (Will Ferrell) navigating step-fatherhood and vying for his step-kids' attention when their biological father, Dusty (Mark Wahlberg), is back in the picture. In Daddy's Home 2, they've found the sweet spot of co-dad-ing (Brad brings Dusty hot cocoa while Dusty is supervising the school drop-off line). Dusty is also re-married and dealing with his own challenges of being a step-dad. Throw in Mel Gibson and John Lithgow as Dusty and Brad's fathers respectively, and there's a lot of working out family dynamics beneath the laughs.
And it's a very Christmas-y movie if you can count a snow blower eating Christmas lights, a cameo by John Cenna lured into the family circle with a rendition of Do They Know It's Christmas? and one of the grandfathers surviving electrocution when they cut down a phone tower, thinking it's a Christmas tree.
And I'm sure uber-Catholics Wahlberg and Gibson got the nativity scene over the line for the movie, although the angel does fall off the stable because she's drunk and the three wise men do engage in an aggressive snowball fight.
Basically, it's a great Christmas movie because it's not sickly sweet, is genuinely funny and doesn't dodge the tough stuff of family relationships. (Having said that, I am a sucker for one of those Netflix Christmas movies in which there's usually a girl running a bakery in a small town where it snows all the time and everything is picture-perfect and through some convoluted plot twists she ends up with her one true love after dodging the one person she should never be with. And there's a cute dog involved somewhere in there as well.)
And maybe, subconsciously, my kids and I like Daddy's Home 2 because at this time of year we're longing more than ever for their dad who passed away six years ago. If that's the case, our subconscious is very transparent and not very deep. I think it's an unspoken thing we just share as we're watching the movie together and laughing at alpha male Gibson arrive on the scene to AC/DC's Thunderstruck or the argument over what temperature the thermostat should be set at with the whole family under one roof.
So, whatever your Christmas movie, or your Christmas Eve traditions, enjoy them.
Merry Christmas everyone.
