Christmas is 22 days away

Cary Grant and Loretta Young in The Bishop's Wife (Dec. 5, 6:00 PM and Dec. 24, 8:00 PM)

We've reached December, as I mentioned when Ingrid Bergman's first night as TCM's Star of the Month came up. For TCM, this is generally the start of the Christmas season, unlike other places which keep getting into Christmas earlier and earlier. For me, if you're secular, the Christmas season should start right after Thanksgiving; having been born Catholic, the first Sunday in Advent (which I think was the Sunday after Thanksgiving) is another good place to start. In any case, for movie fans, Christmas means even our favorite movie channel will be showing Christmas movies.

TCM is going to be having Christmas movies on weekend afternoons the first three weekends of the month, starting after the Saturday matinee slot. At noon tomorrow, they'll be showing the "documentary" A Night at the Movies: Merry Christmas!, which according to the TCM schedule is already ten years old. My how time flies. And then, starting on Monday, Dec. 20 in the run-up to Christmas, there will be a lot more Christmas movies, including in prime time on Dec. 22 pre-empting Ingrid Bergman as Star of the Month.

Now, of course, this means quite a bit of repeats. For better or worse, there are only so many classic Christmas movies and you can certainly argue that they're not making any new classic films, depending on your definition of classic. In any case, even if you want to argue that a movie released in 2021 will become a classic at some point in the future, they're not making enough new classic Christmas films to have enough of a Christmas movie library to avoid repeats of all the studio-era Christas films.

Along the lines of Christmas repeats, I recorded We're No Angels last December. At various points during the year, I thought about doing a blog post on it, but kept thinking that it would be likely to be on the TCM schedule this December. Sure enough, it's getting an airing at 8:00 PM on December 20. So at least I know when I'm getting it off the DVR.

As for this weekend, my favorite of Saturday's selections is It Happened on Fifth Avenue (5:45 PM Saturday) and on Sunday, well, you can probably guess from the photo above.