Get cozy and check out these holiday flicks

Winter. It’s a time to warm up with hot chocolate, ski in the basin and, most importantly, watch Christmas movie marathons. Whether it’s revisiting old cinematic favorites or creating new traditions with friends and family, here’s a list of five Christmas movies to consider viewing this holiday season.

‘12 Dates of Christmas’ (2011)

Perhaps it’s because I’m a sucker for rom-coms, but I fell in love with this Hallmark classic about a girl who relives Christmas Eve 12 times. You might initially get annoyed with the main character, Kate Stanton, who at first seems like a controlling, neurotic spoiled brat, but she learns to grow and love each time the clock turns back. Stanton learns to accept her stepmother, let go of her ex-boyfriend, and find a new significant other, giving 12 Dates of Christmas significant character development and a couple the viewer can actually fall in love with.

‘Love Actually’ (2003)

Set in London, Love Actually is a movie that portrays romance between eight unrelated couples and the trials they face a month before Christmas Day. This film was recommended to me countless times by friends raving about the honest depiction of romance and its many facets, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t understand the hype. While I do think it has the ability to stand strong as a comedy, as a romance, I’m less sure. While the number of couples displayed many different types of “actual love” that ranged from newlyweds to secret admirers and familial bonds, I felt that there were too many to keep track of, which resulted in an insufficient amount of time to see characters face trials and experience growth.

‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ (1964)

While many who were introduced to this movie as young children experience nostalgia revisiting it years later, it was a struggle for me to get through watching it for the first time at age 16. I got annoyed at the characters who treated Rudolph poorly right up until they needed him (go figure), and I couldn’t help but think that if Santa Claus were truly able to see and know everything, then he would have known Rudolph was being bullied, but he chose to ignore it until the end, effectively making him a jerk. Still, teaching children to accept themselves and others for their differences through claymation, talking snowmen and the joy of the Christmas spirit is a method that really can’t be beat.

‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ (1965)

If there’s ever a trend among holiday movies, it’s finding the “true” meaning of Christmas and learning to be thankful for nonmaterialistic goods. After revisiting this classic, I can’t help but think it’s where that theme originated, seeing that it’s all about Charlie Brown and friends rejecting Christmas commercialism in order to love one another and be content with what they have. I always believed that Charlie Brown’s attitude was too mature and melancholy to represent his character’s age, and to quote Linus, he’s the “brownest” of the Charlie Browns, but now I can see why. Without the introspective nature of the Peanuts characters or their more adult-like attitudes (what children these days really stop to think about the superficial nature of Christmas?), we would never have been able to enjoy a classic short with an irreplaceable holiday theme.

‘A Christmas Carol’ (2009)

This movie, like the others on the list, embodies another popular Christmas theme: reflection, growth and giving back. Adapted from Charles Dickens’s novel, the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come visit Ebeneezer Scrooge — a cranky “humbug” — in order to save him from his misery created by wealth and greed. The ending certainly isn’t a mystery — Scrooge becomes nicer and begins giving back, embodying the “spirit of Christmas,” but the real gift that comes with this movie is the guilt it makes you feel when you realize you haven’t been treating your loved ones like you should have.