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Why We Go to the Movies On Christmas Day

The movies are my life. Yes, my life revolves around the art form I fell in love with as a little boy, baptized with movie experiences like Rocky II and Star Wars on VHS, and encouraged by enthusiasts like my parents -- especially my mother, who got me into film scores at an early age. I would thumb through her records, these magisterial giant discs whose sleeves I'd stare at like one of the apes before the monolith. The Empire Strikes Back by John Williams. I remember that record and I remember those pictures on the backside, disturbing images of skeletal robots and a scarred Luke encased in a healing tank. My mother, this beautiful, beautiful young woman, was -- thank heavens -- a nerd, the sort who owned Jerry Goldsmith's score to Star Trek: The Motion Picture in between large squares of the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Menudo.

This enthusiasm was passed on to me. I remember waiting outside Castle Hill Video in the Bronx for hours, for that one copy of Good Morning, Vietnam to come back so I could rent it, bring it home, and watch it with my family. When I turned a teenager, I ingested films like JFK and Pulp Fiction, both of which had a profound effect on me, on how I viewed the world, and how I approached movies. My parents pushed me to see JFK and it opened my eyes in ways difficult to explain. They never "got" Pulp Fiction. It happens. I took them as sacraments, my confirmation as an unadulterated fan without the need to justify to anyone what I love or why I love it.

The movies are my life, not just because I love them and not simply because my work revolves around them. And not just because I'm a geek (although there is that). And these memories, my most cherished times around movies, so many of them keep me warm in colder weather. It's November through December especially, the holiday season where I get to amalgamate three of my favorite things in the world: good food, good movies, and memories with my friends and family.

I associate the holidays with my sister and I dancing to the Ewok's yub nub song as kids one Christmas morning, as joyous a Christmas anthem as "Jingle Bells" as far as we were concerned. Later, I'd associate this period with the Oscar season, the time the so-called "big and important" movies make their case, followed by angry, fruitless debates amongst my friends and family. These days, in between shopping for gifts I play catch up on movies I may have missed in theaters, usually a series of independents. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the studios release a slew of (hopefully) quality commercial films. I unwrap Hugo and the new Mission: Impossible with the anticipation of a child digging into their Christmas morning stockings, tossing aside Breaking Dawn like candy corn.

Life is unpredictable, it spins you around sometimes and throws you off balance. So it's nice to have some traditions. I don't keep many these days. But my Thanksgivings are the same: each year I wake up, I watch some football, I eat some of my cousin Cookie's famous sweet potato pie with it's heavenly candy crust. Then I eat seconds, which almost always means I'm passing on delicious desserts (I never learn). I say my goodbyes to my family and always try to leave my last goodbyes for my grandmothers. This year it was different. One of my grandmothers, my "Abby," was too sick to come. Life's always throwing you curves. I dropped off fruit at her house this year instead. I eventually saw her. I saw Groundhog Day with my mother and grandmother in the theater; I saw Dave with them too.

I head to the movies with my wife, my brother, and my best friend. This year the Thanksgiving movie was The Muppets. I laughed, I smiled, I wocka'd, humming "Life's a Happy Song" on the drive home. A perfect end to a perfect day. Well, maybe not so perfect. The Cowboys could have lost. Abby could have been there.

Sometimes you go through with tradition simply for the sake of it. It's why years ago I saw Alexander, even though I knew it was going to stink, because it was the big Thanksgiving movie that year.

Christmas is on its way. So is my mom's tres leche, my dad's pernil (pig), my grandmother's arroz con gandules, Aunt Maryann's world-famous flan, Cookie's red velvet cake, and Uncle Spielberg's War Horse. These are constants in my life, things I know will always be there so long as they can be and so long as I let them. My dad is a director of radiology at a hospital and sometimes he has to work on Christmas. But my mother is always game to see a Sherlock Holmes or a Juno. This year, my dad has off. So this year I get to see a Steven Spielberg movie with my mom and dad, and there is something very cool about that, something joyously familiar. That's more than tradition. After all the presents are handed out, it's the last one left unwrapped. And it's more than a gift, too. It's a memory, the sort I always seem to remember eventually, the kind I file away in a drawer with the others for safekeeping. When I see another Christmas Day film, I'll open that drawer again and there it will be for as long as my brain allows it. Movies can really become part of the fabric of your life. It doesn't even matter whether it's good or if it's terrible.

The movies may let you down, but the shared memories never will.

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