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:
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), Going My Way (1944), It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), Holiday Affair (1949), A Christmas Carol (1938) and more.
White Christmas
AMC, 5:30 a.m.
Among the holiday favorites AMC has slated today is White Christmas, the beloved 1954 musical that takes its title from Irving Berlin’s classic song made famous by Bing Crosby in the 1942 film Holiday Inn. Crosby also stars here, and performs a new version of the iconic tune, as he and Danny Kaye play veterans who become famous song-and-dance men after World War II. Soon, they join forces with singing sisters (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to help save their former army general’s Vermont inn.
A Very Shirley Christmas Eve
MOVIES!, beginning at 11 a.m.
MOVIES! is celebrating the holiday with an eight-film lineup of movies led by Shirley Temple that can’t help but put you in a happy mood: Bright Eyes (1934), Heidi (1937), Stowaway (1936), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Little Princess (1939),
It’s a Wonderful Life
NBC, 7 p.m.
NBC is once again the exclusive broadcast home for It’s a Wonderful Life (pictured), 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.
The beloved holiday favorite A Christmas Story turns 40 this year, and TBS and TNT are continuing their long-running tradition of airing the film for 24 hours straight beginning tonight. Start times are 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.