Over the years I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about, and writing about, Christmas films. This is a natural consequence of writing about fatherhood in Hollywood: there’s no quicker way to convey BAD DAD than a man who can’t cook a turkey (The Santa Clause), possesses no Christmas spirit (Elf), books a holiday in the Caribbean to avoid hosting a fascistic neighbourhood party (Christmas with the Kranks), prefers playing in a band to spending the day with his family (Jack Frost) or can fly all the way to Paris (IN FIRST CLASS) without double-checking his kid is there (but he’s probably fine, back there in economy) (Home Alone). Redemption is doubly potent when it’s wrapped in tinsel and schmaltz - or, in the case of Jack Frost, the most terrifying snowman costume of all time (because nothing presages capital-T trauma quite like your dead dad returning as a magical entity prone to irreversible melting).
This year, however, having finally finished the manuscript of my forthcoming book about siblings in American cinema (it’s called, appropriately enough, Screening Siblings in Contemporary American Film and it finally has a release date in July!), I was also more attuned than ever to how siblings, rather than parents, function in holiday films. (Maybe this was a good thing, because parents were often functioning as being dead/hospitalised in the ones I watched.) Perhaps the writing was on the wall when my friends and I, primed for whatever Hallmark-esque Lindsay Lohan offering Netflix had to offer this year, discovered that the unmemorably-titled film in question - Our Little Secret (which I could not, and cannot, stop referring to as Our Dirty Secret) - retained, as its central conceit, a pesky sibling connection between two of the main characters. So, slightly belatedly, here’s my by no means exhaustive run down of the best, worst, and most baffling festive portrayals of brothers and sisters on screen I’ve encountered this festive season. Let’s just say: all is forgiven, Love Actually.
I am a firm believer in the Monday morning Pokemon / Friday afternoon Pokemon dichotomy. Monday morning Pokemon: that’s your Charmanders, your Pikachus, your Quagsires. Friday afternoon Pokemon: Klefki. You will never convince me that that Pokemon was born of anything but somebody desperately jangling their keys in their pocket, thinking about going home. Imagine if someone you loved declared that their favourite Pokemon was Klefki. You’d be searching for a helpline number.
Our Little Secret is a solid Wednesday afternoon invention - Christmas! Lindsay! Kristin Chenoweth! - but the narrative conceit is surely the result of a Friday afternoon planning meeting, during which the question - how do you get Lindsay and her ex (I’m sure they had names, but they don’t need names) to spend Christmas together - was met with the first answer that sprung into someone’s head: they’re dating siblings! (All subsequent questions about this set up were presumably answered with, and no one in this universe talks to each other, ever.)
The necessary sibling connection was fair enough, I suppose, but dear god has anyone involved ever witnessed one sibling interacting with another one? The chemistry was through the floor. Zero snark, zero scheming, zero in-jokes. I’m not suggesting Netflix Christmas movies should be searing pieces of cinema verite, but please at least make it seem as if these people might have spent more than three minutes in the same house together during their formative years. Kristin Chenoweth should have been begging them to shut up and stop messing with her by the end of the film, not inexplicably knocking off the ex-husband of her ex-husband’s mistress (you’ll never guess how they’re related! part deux).
(Source: after being delighted to spend an afternoon with both me and my brother shortly before Christmas - ‘it’s so rare I get to see you together, this is so lovely’ - my mum was swiftly aggravated by the continuation of our years-long game of jointly hiding/re-organising the figures from her nativity scene. I had given the sheep pride of place in the barn before I left her house; on Boxing Day, T texted me some photographs of the wise men scattered in various locations around my mum’s house.)
In the calendar of my friendship group, there are two occasions that are sacrosanct. One is Eurovision. The other is the one where we spend the whole day watching Christmas films.
One of the films we chose to watch this year, along with Our Little Secret, was Netflix’s Champagne Problems. I say ‘chose’; a better description might be ‘were victimised by the algorithm’. Two of my dear friends are Taylor Swift fans. Collectively, our average age means the debate over what really constitutes ‘late 30s’ is now a moot point. These things combined place us squarely in the apparent target market for this cinematic monstrosity, if we also assume that none of us have ever watched a film / had an independent thought / heard a real person speak.
Champagne Problems substitutes dad who works too much with single woman who works too much. (It’s modern!) I’m not sure what she works as but it has something to do with wine. She’s got a sleek laptop and she’s going to France (maybe for one day? because time is for losers, or something). Once again, you can kind of see the working out on the page of this film. Maybe she works too hard because… she’s running away from… something? But what? Oh, her mother is dead. Okay, cool. But now who’s going to remind her that, Life Is For Living (As Long As You’ve Found Someone To Share It With)?1 They could have gone with Stoic Good-Natured Dad, but they’d lent him out to Lindsay, so they had to go with Opposite Sister instead.
What is Opposite Sister like? Well, all you really need to know is that she is Not Like The Other One. This is conveyed to the audience in the following way:
Single Workaholic Sister has nice hair and exclusively wears clothes in blush pink / beige tones, thus suggesting that she is competent but unthreatening, unlikely to be taking up any excess space or making any sudden movements. She definitely has more than one face serum and she definitely refers to it as a skincare routine.
Opposite Sister has dark hair in (what passes for) scruffy pigtails and is wearing a green jumper. She probably just swipes on a bit of moisturiser when she remembers.2
Despite the fact that these sisters are both (recently?) bereaved and could probably do with hanging out together in their pyjamas and eating an eight-serving yule log between them, the sister is really just there to provide the narrative impetus and then disappear with her split ends and smudged eyeliner. OS convinces SWS to pop to France and have an adventure meet a man, which SWS promptly does by visiting the kind of European bookshop that Hollywood movies persist in mythologising.
We stopped watching the film at this point. It was painful. We have sat through our share of bad holiday films and misplaced ‘classics’ over the years, and this was the first time we have ever straight up turned one off. So maybe the sister gets to come to Paris, too, and maybe bookshop man (but not really! he’s a rich champagne guy, in case you were worried) had a personality beyond ‘nice jumper’, but I guess I’ll live without that knowledge.
Yes, it’s the Netflix Christmas trifecta! My friend J described this as ‘The Full Monty without the social commentary’ and I cannot better this.
The sisters in this film do appear to know each other and have had a conversation before this specific Christmas, which marks a point of significant progress. Main Sister decides that she can save her parents’ failing small-town bar by organising a series of strip shows at short notice (no one is busy). Supporting Sister does not question the particulars of this plan (if she did, she might FOR EXAMPLE ask why they were apparently charging a $30 cover for a performance that lasted for one song), but she does lend out her husband for the endeavour. I have three brothers-in-law and the idea of directing any one of them in a strip show is the kind of thing regular people get therapy for.
Beyond Paradise Christmas Special
Okay, this broke me.
During lockdown, my husband and I watched every series of Death in Paradise and I am an unabashed fan. Yes, it’s what my favourite comedian Jenny Eclair recently referred to as ‘TV for babies’ on Older and Wider, but there is something relentlessly endearing and cosy about it. The universe has expanded in recent years, to include Beyond Paradise (DIP-in-Devon) and Return to Paradise (DIP-in-Australia), and long may the ludicrous spin-offs continue.3
Beyond Paradise is particularly low-stakes (less death, more solving mildly diverting mysteries while valiantly attempting a Devon accent) and this year’s Christmas special mostly focused on a mysterious break-in, with a villain so pantomime-obvious you might expect a twist, except Beyond Paradise adheres to the Angelou-ian rule: if a character appears looking shadily off to one side and snaps at someone in their first thirty seconds on screen, they are indeed a Bad Person who has done a Bad Thing. The B plot, however, concerned a man with dementia trying to find his sister, who he hadn’t seen since they were children. When they were reunited at the end, having been adopted into different families decades previously, and proceeded to sit on the floor of a museum living room set and play a game together I had a full luteal-style breakdown not seen since I first saw that Dog’s Trust advert that vocalises the dog’s thoughts.4 Rejoice, for the writers on Beyond Paradise have, it seems, spoken to other humans in their lifetime! Formed relationships! Experienced some kind of familial dynamic! Maybe some of them actually have a brother or sister, because this, finally, was a story about siblings at Christmas that made sense, even if it did also make me cry.
The lesser-known Shania hit.
I’m all for being seen in movies but this felt like a personal attack.
During this year’s Death in Paradise Christmas special, we were momentarily hopeful for a spin-off that involved Selwyn solving crimes in the Yorkshire Dales, until the rail service in the UK proved so aggressively awful that it sent him running back to Saint Marie.
Okay, sure, every time I see that Dog’s Trust advert that vocalises the dog’s thoughts.
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