A Holiday Tradition

This weekend I shall crack open a fresh box of wine, get out the scissors, tape, and ribbons, light the fireplace that fills our basement with toxic gas and settle in for a few quiet hours of gift wrapping. For the first time in YEARS, I actually have all but two of my Christmas presents purchased early, however they are all currently sitting in our home office/trash dump waiting patiently to be covered in shiny red paper and topped off with satin bows. Kind of like the land of misfit toys, but without the very obviously homosexual Charlie in the Box.

Everyone has a holiday movie that, despite their Scrooge-iest intentions, will bring them a bit of the spirit of the season. For Lucy, that movie is Santa Claus is Coming to Town, the scary stop motion movie from the sixties. Which I get to watch over and over and over and over again. Lucky me.

For me, that movie, at least for the past few years, has been Love Actually. Sometimes I forget what a great Christmas movie it is, but everytime I watch it I find myself smiling. Below is the opening scene of this movie, which I saw for the first time in my gorgeous apartment in Italy. I sat on the marble floor with my roommate Anna (after a daylong trek to find a video rental store that would not only have movies in English, but would allow two random Americans to rent them) and watched, my eyes misting a bit as I thought about all the train stations and airports I had visited throughout Europe, and how I wished someone was waiting for me on the other end of those trips. And now, whenever I’m traveling, I always take the time to look for these moments, people happy, smiling, seeing each other for the first time in a while. Trent thinks it’s a bit stalker-ish and voyeristic (possibly true), but I can’t help it. I want to see that love is all around, in person, right in front of me. Just makes it all worth it, don’t you think?

Do you have a holiday movie tradition?