I’m not in the camp that has watched this every Christmas for my whole life as a holiday tradition like some do. My 2 Christmas must-watch movies are Home Alone and Arthur Christmas. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I watched it all the way through.

I was at my son’s house and it was being shown on TV and we jumped into the middle of it so we missed a lot of the beginning of it. Also, watching a movie like this on network TV is excruciating! The movie itself is about 2 hours but the time slot is 3 hours so that means every 10 minutes it stops for commercials. I know they are necessary but that’s just excessive.

As with many movies from this era, it suffers from the over-acting bug. Not that current movies don’t do this at times but it seems to be really prominent to me on older films. There’s nothing subtle and everything is over-exaggerated.

So, on Christmas Day, I watched in its entirety from my movie collection, commercial-free. Much better. I like this movie a lot and you’ll get misty or a lump in your throat at the end if you are actually alive. It may not be my favorite Christmas movie but it’s a solid entry in a list of classics.