For more than a century, filmmakers have used screens big and small to spread some Christmas cheer.

What was the first Christmas film? 
In 1898, just a decade after the first film of any kind was made, British filmmaker and stage hypnotist George Albert Smith directed Santa Claus. Less than 90 seconds long, the silent short features the first known use of the double-exposure special effect, showing two children being tucked into bed on the left of the screen while Santa arrives on the family’s roof on the right. Three years later came Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, likely the first film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Thomas Edison’s production company made its contribution with the 1907 short A Little Girl Who Did Not Believe in Santa Claus, in which a well-off boy kidnaps Santa at gunpoint and forces him to visit an impoverished girl who doubts Father Christmas is real. In 1935, one of the first feature-length Christmas talkies, the British-made Scrooge, debuted in theaters. But it was the trauma of World War II, when American family life was disrupted on a massive scale, that inspired Hollywood’s first great wave of Christmas movies. “Audiences craved getting back together,” said film historian Jeremy Arnold, to “feel better and more secure at a time when they weren’t.” 

How did the films reflect that? 
By celebrating the simple things in life. The 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis, about a year in the life of a St. Louis family, builds toward a 25-minute Christmas sequence that emphasizes the importance of love, kith, and kin. The original Miracle on 34th Street (1947) boosts family, friendship, and kindness, pitting a New York department-store Santa against executives who push him to sell more toys. And the healing power of gratitude and decency is the driving theme of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which James Stewart’s do-gooding George Bailey is pushed to the brink of suicide on Christmas Eve before his guardian angel awakens him to his life’s value. The movie, said Arnold, follows the classic Christmas-genre theme of “characters transforming to better, higher versions of themselves.” That message “speaks to us,” he added, “because it’s the magic that we want Christmas to be.” But audiences weren’t initially impressed with director Frank Capra’s morality tale, and it failed to recoup its roughly $3 million budget. 

How did it become a Christmas classic? 
Through repetition. A 1974 clerical error temporarily put It’s a Wonderful Life in the public domain, which meant anyone could air the movie for free. Cable and local TV stations did just that for two decades, airing the film multiple times a day over the holidays. It’s a Wonderful Life found its audience and is now widely considered a masterpiece. “I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president,” Capra said of the film in 1984. “I’m proud as hell, but it’s the kid who did the work.” Yet the most successful Christmas movie of all time would focus less on our shared humanity and more on the joy of subjecting burglars to Looney Tunes–style violence. Home Alone (1990), in which Macaulay Culkin plays an 8-year-old accidentally abandoned over the holidays, took more than $475 million at the box office worldwide and would later sell a whopping 11 million copies on VHS. The next—and perhaps final—big-screen Christmas boom arrived a decade later, partly as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 

Which films were shaped by 9/11? 
Surprisingly, the 2003 hit comedy Elf. The movie follows a human (Will Ferrell) raised by Santa’s elves as he searches for his dad in New York City. Director Jon Favreau, a native New Yorker, has described the movie as his attempt to lift the spirit of “a city in mourning.” Love Actually debuted a week after Elf. A mix of sappy, funny, and sexy Christmas stories, the British smash opens with Hugh Grant’s prime minister talking about the “messages of love” passengers sent as their planes went down on Sept. 11, 2001. “We think of these movies in hazy, feel-good terms,” said film critic Scott Meslow, “and it’s like, no, it’s explicitly about the immediate post-9/11 political era.” But over the next decade Hollywood would pull back from big-screen holiday fare as ticket sales slowed, before tanking 82 percent in the pandemic. More Americans wanted to enjoy holiday films at home, and so cable networks and streaming services started churning out original movies and specials. The Hallmark Channel led the way with its annual “Countdown to Christmas,” a festive romance-movie marathon that starts in mid-October. 

How popular are those movies? 
Hallmark’s low-budget, squeaky-clean offerings collectively attract some 80 million viewers a year. Fans enjoy the predictable storylines, often about career-driven women who are changed by a holiday visit to a small town—the exact plot of Following Yonder Star and ’Tis the Season to Be Irish, two of this season’s 47 new Hallmark Christmas movies. On its website, the Writers Guild Foundation advises would-be Hallmark Christmas scriptwriters to follow a strict nine-act structure—and to note how “there’s hardly a sentence” in each scene description “that doesn’t mention tinsel or scarves or ice skating or snow.” 

What about Hallmark’s rivals?
The Lifetime channel has a dozen new holiday flicks, including Christmas in the Spotlight, a lightly fictionalized retelling of the Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce romance. Netflix has some spicier fare: There’s The Merry Gentlemen, in which a Broadway dancer tries to save her parents’ nightclub with an all-male, Christmas-themed stripper troupe, and Hot Frosty, in which a buff snowman comes to life. Sean Anders, director of the 2022 Scrooge-inspired comedy Spirited, says the popularity of this festive fluff tells us something about our stressed and anxious age. “Film historians will look back on this era and say, ‘What’s with eleventy-thousand Christmas movies?” he said. “Then they will connect it to world events of the time and see a perfect correlation.” 

Snow business 
Snowfall is no respecter of production schedules, necessitating creative solutions when a script calls for flakes. Some silent-movie directors deployed mounds of bleached cornflakes, which proved ill-suited for talkies because of their loud underfoot crunch. It’s a Wonderful Life blanketed its 4-acre set with a mix of soapy water and fire-suppressant foam. A convincing but also carcinogenic hack was used on 1954’s White Christmas: That’s white asbestos tumbling down in the final scene. Today’s productions often use computer-generated snow along with materials such as paper fiber and cellulose. But some filmmakers still insist on the real thing. “We did cheat occasionally” with digital effects, said cinematographer Eigil Bryld, who shot scenes for the melancholy 2023 Christmas drama The Holdovers in various Massachusetts locations. “But that can very easily look a little applied. So, we were really praying for snow.”

“This is the most excitement New Jersey has seen since Tony Soprano,” said Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal. Since mid-November, hundreds of low-flying aircraft have been spotted buzzing around the state at night, including near a military research facility. I’ve seen a few strange craft myself flying over my Jersey home, and they were “flying much lower” and more slowly than planes. Republican congressmen have posited various conspiracy theories—that they are Russian or Chinese spy drones, or that Iran is launching drones from a “mothership” off the East Coast. Donald Trump asserted that the Biden administration “knows what is happening” but isn’t telling us, and advised, “Shoot them down!!!” Federal officials say it became legal last year to fly drones at night, so at least some the objects are, in fact, likely to be drones, and that there’s no national security risk associated with the sightings—which have spread to many other states. “Good thing we have a totally calm, rational public forum” for all the wild speculation. “Ever been to the internet?” 

This kind of panic over “strange sightings in the sky is nothing new,” said Matthew Petti in Reason. A similar hysteria gripped the nation during the ‘UFO fever’ of the 1940s and ‘50s that was rooted in Cold War paranoia. Like then, the aerial sightings of today likely have mundane explanations. The FBI said of the more than 5,000 tips they’ve received, only “about 100” were credible—and most turned out to be just manned small planes. “Mass panic about a drone menace” is clearly causing people to “see things that aren’t there.” 

“At the very least, the drone mystery should be a wake-up call,” said Neil Richards and Ryan Durrie in MSNBC.com. About 1.7 million commercial and recreational drones are registered in the U.S., posing threats to our privacy and airspace. Drones are often equipped with high-resolution cameras, enabling data brokers to “scoop up” health, property, and location information about individuals. Irresponsible drone hobbyists can endanger air traffic. Unfortunately, even when authorities detect such intrusions, “there is not much they can do about them,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Laws on drones are antiquated, and state and federal governments lack clear authority over where these flying machines can go. Congress is considering legislation to form a counter-drone program within the Department of Homeland Security. If this drone scare helps gets this bill passed, “it will have achieved something worthwhile.”

Keira Knightley may have gotten her start in Hollywood too early, said Meredith Blake in the Los Angeles Times. At age 16, the London-born actress appeared in the unexpected 2002 box-office hit Bend It Like Beckham. She soon found herself in near-constant demand, in both the U.K. and the U.S. “I had a five-year period between the ages of 17 and 21-ish, and I’m never going to have that kind of success again,” says Knightley, now 39. Yet “it’s very brutal to have your privacy taken away in your teenage years.” 

She looks back on her role in 2003’s Love Actually as particularly age-inappropriate. In one scene, her newly married character opens the front door to her husband’s best friend—played by Andrew Lincoln, then 30—who professes his love to her with a series of cue cards. While filming the scene, director Richard Curtis told her to stop reacting as if the gesture was creepy. “And I’m like, but it is quite creepy. Also, I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.” Having started acting professionally at 6, Knightley says, she wouldn’t let her daughters, 9 and 5, follow the same path—but then, they haven’t asked. One wants to be “a sweet-shop owner,” she says. “The other one a bear. I don’t think that’s going to work.”