"The mother of all holidays," is how Jean Shepherd put it in his narration of A Christmas Story, and true enough – but Christmas is also the year’s most demanding day (or fortnight, really) in terms of atmosphere, emotional temperature and point of view. We don’t feel a need to get all colonial or even terribly grateful on Thanksgiving; nobody talks about "getting into the spirit" of Mother’s Day, Veterans Day or even Independence Day. But for Christmas, there is a pervasive compulsion to summon reserves of tolerance, generosity, congeniality and child-like upbeat-ness, and we go to extraordinary cultural lengths to make it happen. Hence, the phenomenon known as the Christmas movie, all of which serve as narrative windows into that edenic space where cold hearts are warmed, charitable love dawns on the greedy, and, most of all, the childhood memories and the purest notions of home become easier to grasp and hold. Old movies – closer to the idealized past from which all adult ardor for the holiday flows – are best; crassly commercial contemporary parables about crass commercialism (Jingle All the Way, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Christmas with the Kranks, et al.) are not, and we’ve largely left them behind. The season is short, after all. Here, we've left out the reflexive favorites everyone knows, though rest assured we vet them in Flickipedia.

The Night Before Christmas (1905) This fabulously arthritic Edison production from the infancy of film history – directed by narrative pioneer Edwin S. Porter – is a dusty dream of Victorian faerie-ism, opening with Santa feeding a herd of real reindeer and teeming with antiquey landscape paintings and pre-tech toys. It’s also the climactic short on Kino’s DVD A Christmas Past, a collection of silent, "vintage holiday films" that includes D.W. Griffith’s fiercely moralistic A Trap for Santa (1909), the utterly lovely Edison film of realistic snowfall frolicking A Winter Straw Ride (1906), and Santa Claus (1925), an amateur film proudly shot on and around the Alaskan glaciers. A hypnotic time capsule and an effective pre-modern weapon in the war against shopping and accumulation for their own sakes.

Scrooge (1935) It’s a tiring parable, but Charles Dickens’s chestnut A Christmas Carol is all but unavoidable. Preachy, sure, but it’s such an overused story that you can hardly watch an hour of November television without being pelted by a commercial’s reference to it. Better to go to the source – reading! – or this first sound version, British-made, starring stage vet Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. A creaky, attic-webby beaut, choked with shadow and fog.

Remember the Night (1940) An overlooked screwball masterpiece from Hollywood’s Golden Age, written by bad-boy satiric genius Preston Sturges and directed by premier woman’s director Mitchell Leisen, in which whimsical bachelor-DA Fred MacMurray takes sexy shoplifting tramp Barbara Stanwyck with him to his homestead for Christmas. Sturges’s dialogue, volleyed by these pros four years before Double Indemnity, is mint, but the idiosyncratic comedy slowly, organically seeps into melancholy. The film is as smart-mouthed as it is stunningly compassionate, and Sturges’s fat heart comes through in ways that are unique in a Christmas film. The characters’ feet are planted in the real world, and the season’s triumph is rescue from the memory of a poisoned childhood.

Beyond Tomorrow (1940) An fiercely odd septuagenarian Christmas tale from the authoress of Love Affair, this forgotten dilly concerns three bachelor fogeys (buoyant Charles Winninger, crusty/affable C. Aubrey Smith, dyspeptic Harry Carey) who die and return as ghosts to facilitate the seemingly doomed romance of young ‘uns. The character-actor star-power alone makes it worth seeking out, but the story is a fabulous lark. Sometimes retitled Beyond Christmas.

Holiday Inn (1942) Possibly the best movie to watch while wrapping presents. Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are a pair of showman who decide to open a country inn that celebrates every holiday with song and dance. That’s it for story. As you’d expect, most of the film is caught up with other seasonal occasions; Christmas is just one page on the calendar. It just so happens that the movie’s endearingly canned studio winter and Irving Berlin’s "White Christmas" are the most memorable things about it. That’s fine: you’re looking for tape. Anyway, from today’s perspective, there’s something inherently Christmasy about the hat-wearing, crooner-loving, homefront ‘40s, isn’t there?

The Holly and the Ivy (1952) A cozy, mature and rarely-seen British heartwarmer in which an aging parson and widower (Ralph Richardson) convenes with his three adult children and other relatives on their cozy village homestead for the holidays - to reminisce about the war, remember dead loved ones, and to lay bare a few family secrets. Director George More O’Ferrall is no Frank Capra, but there’s a lot of genuine warmth to go around.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) Baby-boomers know this puppet-animated fable’s scary oddnesses inside and out: the Burl Ives snowman in a plaid vest, the icy toy mansion in the snow, the feverish anxiety about reindeer employment, the Island of Misfit Toys’ winged lion-king, the too-chilling Abominable, complete with giant shark teeth and autonomously mobile fur. Forgive us if we think this decades-old kid’s fodder more than a little strange, from the song lyrics ("We all pretend the rainbow has an end," the key ballad says, "and you’ll be there my friend someday...") to the ending credits, when a sleigh-riding elf, distributing umbrellas to the toys and then tossing them overboard, figures a toy bird can do without and drops him, not knowing it’s a Misfit Toy alum and cannot fly. But that is all decidedly beside the point; for most intents and purposes, because we grew up with it being broadcast every year, it’s an annual must-see. Of course, the Rankin/Bass animation mill rapped out other seasonal staples, all to some degree essential: The Little Drummer Boy (1968), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), and others far less memorable. But Rudolph is the genre’s greatest head-trip, a weird dream within which we all remain bewildered children.

Comfort and Joy (1984) Scottish director Bill Forsyth is – or perhaps was, since his only film since 1993 was never released in the U.S. – a master of gentle discombobulation, and his Christmas movie is appropriately wacky, but in a quiet, generous way. The holiday here is experienced by a middle-aged Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson), whose sexy kleptomanic girlfriend walks out on a mysterious whim, and whose subsequent Christmastime loneliness is abated only by his involvement in a turf war fought between two rival ice cream vendors. With Forsyth it’s all in the details and rhythms, and the movie has a thoughtful, ruminative personality that could do wonders, as the titled implies, for the sad-sacked and lonesome.

Gremlins (1984) A nasty, fantastically clever antidote-film for those of us who think that Christmas commercialism has gotten completely out of hand. Here, seemingly innocent Christmas presents have a Hyde side, take on carnivorous lives of their own and hunt down their recipients. The mayhem of Joe Dante’s badtime-dream – in which adorable Muppet-ish furball creatures, once introduced into suburbia as gifted pets, transform into raving homunculi – might be the most astute metaphor for holiday capitalism ever devised; what seems at first an ordinary act of giving becomes a bloodthirsty battle to the death. (Is there a more triumphant moment in all of ‘80s Hollywood than the hero’s mom, faced with a kitchen full of malevolent harpies, gearing into combat mode and dispatching the cackling creatures in the blender and the microwave?) Should we all have to fight our gifts? We’d certainly give the exchange, and the intent behind it, a lot more thought.

The Dead (1987) Director John Huston may have been close to dying, but apparently no one else was going to film James Joyce’s most famous short story, and make it an indelibly mournful, Old-World Christmas experience. Two spinster aunts host a Christmas dinner in turn-of-the-century Dublin, when ladies wore long skirts and high lace collars and guests entertained each other with stories, songs and dancing. Outside, horse-drawn carriages glide gently through the snow; inside, the holiday feast is an occasion to discuss scandals and politics before setting aflame the Christmas pudding. That is, before a plaintive singing of a sad Irish ballad, and suddenly the past returns and the present begins to decay and the season’s marking of time and age inspires a deep and universal melancholy. Something of a family affair (Huston’s son Tony wrote the ingeniously expanded screenplay, and daughter Angelica stars as the wife with a secret story), this dreamy adaptation refuses to be hurried, and Joyce’s prose (narrated by Donal McCann, as the husband) is surpassingly eloquent. With logs for the fire and a toast in hand, it’s a salve for those hungering for a more literate, and subtly powerful, holiday film.

Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1987) It may be one of America’s best kept secrets: we don’t really like the ballet of The Nutcracker very much, and resent having to ingest it every year as if it were a citizenship requirement. Most of us would be surprised to learn that the original E.T.A. Hoffmann tale has precious little to do with sugar-plum fairies and all to do with a rather vicious war between toys and monster mice. Filming ballets has always been a bad move in any event, but this Carroll Ballard film version has a few saving graces, beyond the score: it’s designed by Maurice Sendak, and it has a bewitching opening act, in which the Drosselmeier figure embarks on his epic toymaking, shot in intricate close-up. Then there’s dancing.

Elf (2003) Christmas sappiness plus flatout contemporary yucks, with Will Ferrell making himself a bankable star as a human-raised-as-North-pole-elf who gets detoured, in Miracle on 34^th Street-slash-Big fashion, to the new New York – which isn’t all that different from the old New York of our Christmas movie memories, down to Ferrell’s employment at Gimbel’s (shot, it seems, in the survivor of the department store giants, Macy’s). An unexpected surprise is Zooey Deschanel crooning "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" in a voice rich enough to rival the original Esther Williams version.