With no disrespect to Andy Williams, Scrooge or the fine manufacturers of Red Ryder BB guns, sometimes even Christmas calls for a break with tradition.
So here are some suggestions of movies, music and short stories that provide a change of pace.
Some are sentimental gems like the short story “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor.” Others feature monsters or terrorists. All are a worthy substitute for those seeking a break from George Bailey’s story.
The movies
“The Shop Around the Corner,” starring James Stewart
Stewart plays a clerk in a Hungarian leather-goods shop corresponding through the mail with an unknown woman who, coincidentally, ends up being a fellow clerk played by Margaret Sullavan. While the two are at odds in the shop, their letters find them falling in love. The plot builds to the climax on a snowy Christmas Eve.
When the critics at Time Magazine included this 1940 film on their list of the 100 greatest movies, they lauded its “combination of wry observation, delicate sentiment and gently controlled romanticism.”
“Die Hard,” starring Bruce Willis
Another favorite — this one was voted No. 1 on Entertainment Weekly’s 2007 list of action movies — “Die Hard” is perfect for those nights when you’re sick of all the holiday hoopla and just want to see some stinking terrorists die.
At an office Christmas party in Los Angeles, New York police detective John McClane waits for his estranged wife when, improbably, terrorists take over the building. According to Amazon.com, McClane then launches a one-man war against the terrorists, “armed with only a service revolver and his cunning.”
Yep. That pretty well sums it up.
“The Apartment,” starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine
Upwardly mobile bachelor C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) lets executives use his apartment for their extramarital affairs. This leads to a near-tragedy, as one slighted beauty — Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in Baxter’s office building — attempts suicide in his apartment on Christmas Eve.
Upon the film’s 1960 release, the New York Times praised director Billy Wilder, saying “his direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.” The movie went on to win the Oscar for best picture.
“Gremlins,” starring little green monsters
A traveling inventor buys a cute creature from a mystical store in San Francisco’s Chinatown as a Christmas gift for his college-aged son. After some basic rules are broken — don’t get the creature wet or feed it after midnight — the fuzzy animal multiplies and its offspring turn into devious, reptilian gremlins.
As Roger Ebert wrote in 1984: “‘Gremlins’ is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell’s vision of Christmas and Hollywood’s vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It’s fun.”
The songs
Rather than trying to select any single Christmas album from the thousands out there, here are a few carols and hymns recorded by musicians from Washington state.
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” Death Cab for Cutie
U2’s souped-up version of this 1960s song largely popularized the tune, but the Bellingham natives Death Cab for Cutie add sweet heartache to a more heartfelt 2004 recording, found on “Maybe This Christmas Tree.”
“Sleigh Ride,” The Ventures
The instrumental surf-rock group from Tacoma is best suited for summertime. Still, the group delivers a rousing version of “Sleigh Ride” on its album, “Christmas Joy.” It’s a winter storm of clean guitar from the group best known for the “Hawaii Five-O” theme.
“White Christmas,” Queensryche
Included on 2007’s “Monster Ballads Xmas,” Bellevue hair metal icon Queensryche delivers an amped-up version of this Bing Crosby classic. It’s not exactly good, but hey, did you really expect it to be?
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” Don Lanphere
People sometimes forget Christmas is as much about mystery as it is about generosity and hope. So, appropriately enough, on this jazz recording from “Year ‘Round Christmas,” a saxophonist and Seattle musician, the late Don Lanphere, injects a fair amount of haunting ache into a Christmas hymn.
“The First Noel,” Bing Crosby
With more than half a billion records sold, this Tacoma-born crooner is considered the most popular radio star of all time, according to the All Music Guide. Generations later, his carols have weathered the test of time. While his biggest hit was “White Christmas,” for a change of pace, try hunting down “The First Noel,” with its charmingly dated spoken-word intro, available on “All-Star Christmas.”
The stories
“Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” by John Cheever
Although this sentimental story originally saw print in the New Yorker in 1949 — a year before Charlie Brown first appeared — Charlie the doorman seems seconds away from muttering “good grief” throughout.
Stuck working the elevator in an upscale building on Christmas, he eventually gets fired for getting drunk on the job. Cheever injects plenty of humor into his urban wonderland, concluding that Christmas is the time when “we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day.”
The story is anthologized in many places, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Stories of John Cheever.”
“Christmas Freud,” by David Rakoff
In this droll piece of nonfiction, David Rakoff ends up on display at upscale retailer Barney’s, playing the father of psychoanalysis in a holiday window display. He wonders if his shtick could catch on, triggering a Christmas Freud movement that provides “grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight.”
A humorous story that finds Rakoff stringing together observations like popcorn on a thread, “Christmas Freud” is included in the author’s well-received 2001 book, “Fraud.”
“Dinah, the Christmas Whore,” by David Sedaris
Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” this is not. David Sedaris remembers one special Christmas when a prostitute visited his childhood home. His mother, a blunt woman, welcomed the wayward soul.
“Oh, thank goodness. … I was afraid you were one of those damned carolers,” his mother said, before offering the titular Dinah a drink.
Throughout the story, from the 1997 best-seller “Naked,” Sedaris delights in busting up holiday cliches, eventually sharing his new take on the phrase “ho, ho, ho.”
Reporter Andy Rathbun: 425-339-3455 or e-mail arathbun@heraldnet.com.
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