Have yourselves a very archive Christmas!

~ Lucy Janes

One December about ten years ago I was off work sick and spent much of the month on the sofa. From which vantage point I discovered the daily Christmas movie anchoring Channel 5 afternoons. Fast forward from that innocent era of one film a day, and the Christmas movie industry is supporting entire channels broadcasting round the clock from Halloween onwards, and stars a-plenty are signing up for their festive turns on the silver screen.

It’s a season of magic and joy yet also it’s a time for sometimes painful reflection on the past: regret for opportunities missed; sorrow for the people lost; and longing for different choices. Remembrance is the sharp cranberry sauce that intensifies the bland turkey of joy. (Which is perhaps where I should mention that Christmas is also the season of forgiveness.)

So where did silver screen Christmas begin?

One of the oldest Christmas films features the OG of seasonal stories. Well, no, not that one! But it is the seasonal ghost story that laid the Victorian foundations for all those variations on the ‘revisit the past and change your ways’ narratives. The final scene is missing but here are the six delightful minutes of Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, preserved and shared by the British Film Institute archive.

In fact, there is now a Christmas movie called The Man Who Invented Christmas which tells the story of how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol. There are more than 70 entries on the Internet Movie Database with that title alone and, of course, there are many, many more films that take the story’s core themes and weave them into sparkly new displays.

In many of these the ‘revisting the past’ element is provided by someone from a modern setting – the impersonal, alienating big city – being unexpectedly stranded in a small town where old-fashioned values of community solidarity and caring for your neighbours trump rushing about and making money.

Reflecting on the past? Learning for the future? But these are also the bread and brandy butter of archives! So I asked myself, where are the archives in Christmas movies? Where are the glamorous, big city archivists thrown together with rugged smalltown guys struggling to save a family business, a situation that enables everyone to learn the true meaning of Christmas, and also fall in love along the way?

I investigated…

A time for family…

Archive materials are the documents that are created as a result of an organisation or person just doing what they do. So, in terms of Christmas already there’s a massive archive: children’s letters to Father Christmas / Santa Claus.

Thanks to the lovely Peeling the Past blog for highlighting this and pointing out the beautiful representation of this archive collection in The Christmas Chronicles (2018) where every letter ever written to Santa is safely stored alphabetically in a marvellous magical cabinet. Though it’s worth noting that in archive terms, this is quite an unusual collection in that all the documents have been created directly by children – people who are generally not much represented as creators of archives.

Letters – a family archive – in the Christmas Inheritance (2017) send rich city girl Ellie back to the small town where her father’s business empire began. She’s tasked with delivering the traditional annual letter from her father to his brother, where – surprise! – getting involved with the life of the town, and a handsome local business owner, help her appreciate the sense of community. Reading the old letters brings her into a new relationship with her family history and, perhaps, a new future. It’s all eminently watchable, though they missed a meme-able moment by not having kindly Christmas cookie baker Andi MacDowell stand out in the street saying “Is it still snowing? I hadn’t noticed”.

No stars for guessing what kind of archive document features in The Noel Diary (2022). In this slightly different take on the tropes, handsome romance author Jacob Turner lives in chilly isolation in a fabulous house with his beautiful husky dog Rita. But this Christmas he has to clear his mother’s home after her death, having not seen her, or his divorced father, for years following a family trauma. He meets a mysterious young woman who’s looking for the diary, and equipped with both the diary and information from the personal memories of the next door neighbour – the delightful Bonnie Bedelia doing a turn in a Christmas movie that’s not the canonical Die Hard – they embark together on a Christmas quest for truth, love and reconciliation.

So archives help to bring people together! But what of the archivists, the guardians of these magic portals to the past?

A time for sharing…

Take a look at Christmas at the Plaza (2019) where glamorous big city “archival historian” Jessica has been employed to curate a display about the history of Christmas at the Plaza Hotel, New York. Faced with hundreds of boxes of uncatalogued artefacts in the records store – “Nothing has been digitally preserved!” cries the hotel manager gleefully – she almost gives up. But chatting with a veteran employee reveals that the Plaza has commissioned a new Christmas finial d’arbre – or tree topper – every year since 1907. She starts to unearth them in the archive but then finds that the topper is missing for one year. So what happened in 1969? Well, that, of course, is the cue for one character to look back on the past and have the chance to heal a broken heart. Though the action all takes place in the big city, the small town element appears when Jessica joins the annual charity present-wrapping party of hunky decorator Nick who’s installing the Christmas lights at the Plaza. While the family party is a mirror to the fancy hotel setting, the real contrast is with Jessica’s snooty University colleagues who laugh at her social-cultural history project to recover the past through the biographies of archive objects – the finial d’arbres. However Nick recognises that the value of her work, understanding that the stories she is unearthing are reactivating community memories. It doesn’t take much to get the gist of where the plot is going but it’s charmingly done, even though – naughty! – Jessica gets so caught up in uncovering the hidden history she never gets round to the hard graft of creating a catalogue.

Jessica (Elizabeth Henstridge) and Nick (Ryan Paevey) in the Plaza’s records room.

Tree decorations as an archive of community history also feature in Christmas in Scotland (2023). This time glamorous big city department store window designer Emma McKenzie leaves New York to end up in smalltown Scotland (filmed in Culross) with her dad who is on a family history trip. While he spends his time researching their family tree in the old books of the local library / archive, and being shushed by the stern librarian in glasses and twinset (sigh!), she’s persuaded to help the town create a festive light display. Her inspiration is to draw on local history, adopting what we might call – if we really want to suck all the Christmas joy out of it – a place-based approach to public engagement with heritage. The local residents create their own personal decorations for the village Christmas tree which are linked to their family’s history in the town. It’s so charming and delightful that the no-good, hardhearted, conniving neighbouring village steals the idea for their Christmas display. All to win a competition, albeit with a generous cash prize (which in real life probably would feel like a Christmas miracle for our hard-pressed local authorities). But back in fantasy Scotland, the Christmas spirit finally acts upon the local Scroogey curmudgeons, and love is all around us.

A time of mystery…

Scotland’s blessed with oodles of history and an abundance of small towns. Meaning that Lucy Stewart – a glamorous big city archeaologist – can arrive in small town Scotland the week before Christmas to inspect some newly discovered antiquarian books – while wearing ‘archival’ white cotton gloves, of course – that may have clues to a mysterious Pictish shrine. If she finds the shrine she’ll save her job at a fancy New York museum but meantime she’s also kept busy with a ghostly stately home; whimsical locals who believe in the Cailleach Bheurra, the Gaelic Queen of Winter; and long walks in the misty glens with Duncan, handsome local man dealing with family business troubles. The lessons learned in Saving Christmas Spirit (2022) include accepting change while respecting the past. And that girls can play rugby. Does she find the shrine, keep her job and get her man? Well, it’s Christmas so anything is possible! Except a big twist.

The irresistible nature of a historical mystery is actually centre to two of this year’s TV Christmas gifts. I haven’t yet seen the big new Hallmark festive offering but the Decider review of The Mystery of Mistletoe Lane explains that when Heidi and her two children move from North Carolina so she can become the director of the historical society in the New England town of New Hollow, they move into an old house. She’s there to restore the town’s old buildings – the classic strategy of using built heritage to revitalise the town centre – but faces a festive battle with the town’s deputy mayor who plans to close the historical society to save money. Meanwhile the children discover tiny reindeer figurines in the house which hold a series of clues to a past mystery and, happily, handsome David, a former director of the historical society, is also on hand to help investigate.

Big thanks to Louise Bell on Twitter/X for drawing A Star for Christmas (Channel 5, 2023) to my attention. This time it’s glamorous, big city property developer Gracie who needs the expertise of Happy Hollow town historian Jack to track down the owners of five wee plots of land that could stymie her plan to build a new hotel. They hang out in the town museum and what looks like a real archive (complete with rolling stacks) quite a lot. There’s a tremendous moment when Gracie, frustrated at not getting access to the land records she needs, declares that the county government office is “holding the records hostage” exactly like Jacques Derrida describing documents moving into archives as entering “house arrest” (Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1994). To get around this Gracie and Jack employ some innovative archival research techniques in their quest, such as using an oral history approach to elicit childhood memories from an old lady and then ‘reading’ these memories ‘against the archival grain’ by using their imaginations to make connections that lead to the facts. Archival values collapse somewhat when Jack allows Gracie to wear an outfit from the museum to a costume party – shades of the Kim Kardashian Marilyn Monroe Met Gala dress stunt – but in the end they both learn more about how to value time and move forward by building with the past.

Gracie (Tamara Almeida) and Jack (Cody Ray Thompson) in the stacks

A time to be together…

The star atop the tree of look-back Christmas movies is, of course, It’s A Wonderful Life. It includes plenty of reflections on the past, as unhappy George Bailey reassesses his life and learns of his personal place in his small town’s history. The scene that I personally enjoy the most is seeing Mary, who without George, is living her alternative life as a spinster librarian. Worst fate ever? Or perhaps #LifeGoals?! The jury’s out but it serves to remind us all of the paths not taken.

Following the template laid out by A Christmas Carol, Christmas movies often end with a party, and as Christmas is also a time for a bit of over-indulgence, why not cram in just one more treat? In Desk Set Katherine Hepburn plays librarian Bunny Watson, who has a mind like steel trap, can recite memorised poetry by the yard, and leads the super-efficient, all-female, research department for a American TV company. But her brains can’t stop her falling for a cad. And she’s worried that a new super computer is about to put them all out of their jobs. However ’tis the season and magic is in the air… mostly in the form of champagne and hard liquor. Although you’d never be allowed alcohol – or indeed any food or drink inside an archive – a research department is a bit different. And before you can name all of Santa’s reindeer (which Bunny most definitely can) there’s a hilariously boozy office Christmas party, reflections on years gone by, revelations all round, and a fresh outlook for the brand new year.

The research department’s Christmas party gets started (Sue Randall, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill)

So, the true meaning of Christmas, as revealed by archives? Perhaps it is that looking back is important because it’s actually a way to step forward; new knowledge and understanding gleaned from the past renews us for the frays and joys of living in the present.

Down the hatch!

Sources of movie info

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