CATCH A CLASSIC
This Christmas Eve, Santa has brought a lot of great gifts for fans of classic movies, and you might find yourself hard-pressed to open them all:
Best Christmas Marathon
AMC, Beginning at 5 a.m.
AMC kicks off its 48-hour Best Christmas
Marathon early today with Jack Frost (1979). Over the next two days, the mix of
movies and beloved Rankin/Bass specials airing during this marathon include Rudolph’s Shiny New Year (1976), White Christmas (1954), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Elf (2003), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989), The Polar Express (2004) and plenty of others.
Christmas Marathon Continues
TCM, Beginning at 5 a.m.
TCM’s Christmas movie marathon continues today, beginning in the early morning and featuring highlights such as Tenth Avenue Angel (1948), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), A Christmas Carol (1938) and more.
A Very Shirley Christmas Eve
MOVIES!, Beginning at 10:15 a.m. MOVIES! is celebrating the holiday with a 10-film lineup of movies led by Shirley Temple that can’t help but put you in a happy mood: Heidi (1937), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), Susannah of the Mounties (1939), Captain January (1936), Curly Top (1935), Bright Eyes (1934), The Little Princess (1939), Stowaway (1936), Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and The Blue Bird (1940).
It’s a Wonderful Life
NBC, 7 p.m.
NBC is once again the exclusive broadcast home for It’s a Wonderful Life, airing this evening. Frank Capra’s beloved, Oscar-winning 1946 holiday classic stars Best Actor Oscar nominee James Stewart as George Bailey, a discouraged and despairing building-and-loan manager who contemplates suicide before a guardian angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) intervenes and allows him to see what George’s small town of Bedford Falls would be without him — and all that is right in his world. Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore also star.
24 Hours of ‘A Christmas Story’
TBS, Beginning at 7 p.m.;
TNT, Beginning at 8 p.m.
TBS and TNT are continuing the 25-year tradition of airing 1983’s A Christmas Story for 24 hours straight beginning tonight, with start times an hour apart between the networks so you can flip back and forth to different points in this beloved story of a 1940s kid (Peter Billingsley) who
desperately wants a BB gun for Christmas despite repeated warnings that he’ll shoot his eye out.