Christmas month

It's hard to believe, but we're already into the final month of 2024. For certain branches of Christianity, notably Catholics, it's the first Sunday of Advent, which is I think in many ways the start of the ecclesiatical Christmas season. In US secular life, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was in some ways the start of the season, as the parade concluded with Santa Claus. Nowadays, the start of the Christmas season is getting pushed earlier and earlier, with radio stations starting their all-Christmas format as early as the end of Halloween.

TCM is, unsurprisingly, doing Christmas as always. They're having Christmas movies on weekend afternoons, starting this afternoon with Meet Me in St. Louis at 4:00 PM followed by The Bishop's Wife at 6:00 PM. Some of the movies are more in the "Jesus is the reason for the season" vein, as TCM is running the 1959 Ben-Hur followed by the 1961 King of Kings.

TCM then has its annual Christmas marathon, starting with the prime-time lineup on Friday, Dec. 20. Some of the films are going to be repeats from earlier in the month, and of course I've blogged about a lot of them before, but I'll make mention of some of those films as the marathon gets closer. Once again, TCM's Christmas marathon ends with... the daypart of the Dec. 25 schedule. Prime time is a night of ghost/spirit films, albeit not in the horror sense. That's something that's long bugged me, how many people want to end the Christmas season as soon as Dec. 25 comes around. I don't go all the way through to Twelfth Night/Epiphany the way the Catholic liturgy in particular does, but the rest of the month of December isn't a bad way to continue the Christmas celebration.

As for the rest of the month on TCM, I'll mention the Star of the Month when that comes up in a few days. Tonight sees the first of four nights in which Dave Karger will be sitting down with comedy legend Carol Burnett. She's presenting several movies that inspired parodies she did on her variety show that ran for a dozen years in the last half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. Apparently, they'll also be showing some of those parodies along with the movies. This runs for four of the Sundays in the month as I mentioned above; Burnett will not be on the Dec. 22 schedule as that's part of the Christmas marathon.