Since it’s December, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at how Christmas films became an established genre, starting with the very earliest Christmas film and seeing how things evolved through to Hollywood’s Golden Age.
I always think that Christmas films are a bit unique as a genre – movies we watch year after year (sometimes only in part) that are much more united than films in other genres in terms of providing a consistent, reliable product – namely, feel-good festive cheer.
The components of that festive cheer aren’t really debated, and while there are films that push the boundaries in various ways (thank you, Bad Santa) they often reinforce them even as they skewer them.
But how did the genre even come to be in the first place? Who first thought that Christmas would make a great subject for a movie? For the answer to that question, we have to go back to one of the great Victorians, the British tradition of winter ghost stories, and a Hollywood studio system that learned to read the calendar as closely as a balance sheet.
Long before cinema discovered Christmas, Dickens got there first.
Ghosts, hearths, and a very Victorian emotional blueprint
Before the 19th century, Christmas in Britain was a much more raucous affair. Its customs varied wildly by place and class, and for many people it was louder than it was cosy. The Victorians didn’t invent Christmas, but they reshaped it – polishing it, drawing it indoors, and investing it with feeling and ritual, from Christmas trees (introduced originally by Queen Charlotte and later popularised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) to crackers, what we now think of as a traditional Christmas dinner, and even Christmas cards.
Winter ghost stories were already popular. For centuries, dark evenings had been filled with supernatural tales told around fires, half for entertainment and half because winter itself felt liminal, a season where the usual boundaries between worlds seemed thinner.
When Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, he was combining both of these cultural forces into something new – ghosts who visit to instruct, rather than frighten, and the idea of a cosy family Christmas where peace and goodwill rule.
Dickens’ ghosts bring memory and regret but also the possibility of change, making the supernatural sentimental without losing its bite. Christmas, in Dickens’ hands, is transformed into a moment of moral pause – a time when people are expected to look inward, then outward, and improve themselves. Scrooge’s story has been adapted and rewritten an astonishing number of times, and is still beloved today.
Dickens returned time and again to the season. Annual Christmas books, festive magazine numbers, ghostly tales published and republished every December – all of this helped cement the idea that Christmas should come with a story, and not just any story, but one weighted with warmth, unease, introspection and eventual relief.
By the time cinema arrived, Christmas already had a narrative spine.
From fireside to flicker
It’s telling that one of the earliest ever narrative films was Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost. This 1901 adaptation is barely ten minutes long, yet it already contains the DNA of the Christmas film: snow, spirits, transformation, and the suggestion that something about this particular night allows the world to tilt briefly towards mercy.
The technology is primitive, but the ambition is not. Double exposure creates translucent ghosts; the dissolves mimic memory and dream. What’s striking even with the very limited technology of the time is how instinctively cinematic the story proves to be. Dickens’ Christmas is visual, theatrical, emotionally legible.
What this early film really shows is that Christmas stories were assumed to be naturally suited to film almost from cinema’s birth. Of all the genres being explored by the earliest filmmakers, I find it fascinating that one of them was Christmas films.
Hollywood reads the year
If Dickens supplied Christmas with its emotional architecture, Hollywood would eventually give it infrastructure.
By the 1930s and 40s, the studio system had learned to think seasonally. Films were not simply released; they were positioned. Studios paid attention to when audiences were available, receptive, or emotionally primed.
Summer favoured spectacle, autumn angled for prestige, and winter – especially December – leaned towards warmth and sentiment.
Christmas, from Hollywood’s perspective, was the ideal subject for filmmakers seeking commercial success. It promised family audiences, familiar imagery, and a shared emotional shorthand. Christmas didn’t need to be explained; viewers brought half the meaning with them.
Holiday Inn (1942) is where this logic quietly reveals itself. Though structured around multiple holidays, it is the Christmas sequence – and Irving Berlin’s newly written song “White Christmas” – that lodges itself in collective memory.
The song was not initially intended to dominate, but its success reshaped the film’s legacy, and arguably Hollywood’s understanding of seasonal cinema. Bing Crosby stars as a performer who retires from showbiz to open an inn in Connecticut, which only opens during national holidays. There are sequences and songs for each of the major holidays as Crosby falls in love with his new co-star, while also trying to ensure she isn’t lured to Hollywood by his former partner, who has a history of stealing his girlfriends away both romantically and as dance partners.
It’s full of charm and comedy as well as beautiful scenery, and Marjorie Reynolds really shines as Crosby’s love interest.
What’s most charming about Holiday Inn though is its lightness: it doesn’t strain for depth, it’s just enjoyable. The success of the film itself, and especially of the song, showed that Christmas could be the emotional centre of the year, the holiday which audiences connected to most.
When meaning locks into place
If Holiday Inn shows Christmas’s commercial pull, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) helped to establish the genre’s emotional heart.
Famously unsparing for something now considered festive, for much of its (long) running time, it’s about exhaustion, frustration, and the slow erosion of idealism. Christmas itself arrives late, almost tentatively, and yet when it does, it recontextualises everything that came before. It’s a long time before it starts getting cheerful: there’s no romance here, but plenty of depression.
The film follows the story of George Bailey, a man living in the small town of Bedford Falls, who finds himself contemplating suicide one Christmas Eve. Up in Heaven, an angel called Clarence is assigned to save him, and shows him an alternate timeline of the lives he has influenced, and the difference he has made to those he loves.
It is unapologetically sentimental without being schmaltzy, and the message at the core of the movie – that each and every one of us is precious and irreplaceable – clearly still resonates today: It’s A Wonderful Life regularly ranks in the top movies of all time, despite being a box office failure at the time of its release (it only gained popularity through television reruns decades later).
For me, what’s wonderful about the story is its faith in connection rather than spectacle. George’s redemption comes not through success or recognition, but through community, and the relationships George has built throughout his life.
Certainty, colour, and comfort
The arrival of White Christmas in 1954 heralded the Christmas movie as a full colour, all-singing, all-dancing holiday extravaganza. Shot in lavish VistaVision colour, stuffed with songs, snow and easy romance, it is utterly confident in its appeal and a joy to watch.
Here, Crosby stars again as a showbiz performer who stumbles across his old army General running an inn in Vermont, close to bankruptcy. Crosby and his showbiz partner Davis, played by Danny Kaye, hatch a plan to save the inn and reunite the General with his beloved division.
Of course, there are complications along the way and a romance plot too, involving two singing and dancing sisters, which adds further twists and turns before our heroes find their happy ending.
As a movie, it cements the Christmas movie genre as a dependable product, making Christmas films into annual promises, designed to deliver comfort on schedule – and it really does deliver. It doesn’t matter that much of that comfort is artifice: the snow is fake, the nostalgia manufactured – just like more modern Christmas films. To me, that’s all part of the genre’s appeal – there’s a reliability to Christmas movies in that you know there’ll be a happy ending, a little like reading a romcom novel or a Jack Reacher book – no matter how difficult the journey, you’re guaranteed a happy, satisfying ending.
I can certainly understand that post-war audiences must have enjoyed experiencing Christmas as an idealised version of home – and of course Hollywood was happy to oblige.
Why we keep watching
From Dickens’ ghosts to Capra’s angel, from early trick photography to slick studio spectacle, Christmas films have always offered more than seasonal distraction: they offer emotional order.
Once a year, they suggest, people might reconnect, values might realign, and the world might briefly make sense under fairy lights and falling snow.
That promise was built deliberately, out of Victorian sentiment, winter unease, studio pragmatism, and the peculiar comfort of repetition. And it endures for the same reason we keep rereading familiar books at the same time each year: not because Christmas films are timeless, necessarily, but because they are reliably reassuring, exactly the kind of warm and cosy blanket we all need at this time of year.