Beverly D’Angelo and Chevy Chase in ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.’ (Warner Bros.)
Twenty-five years ago this month I was living in New York City, and after leaving work one afternoon I ducked into a midtown movie theater to watch a new film, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Two hours later I thought to myself, so this is what it feels like to be mugged in New York.
The Vacation film franchise was born in 1983, with an agreeable time-waster that put some cash in Chevy Chase’s pocket. 1989’s Christmas Vacation, third in the series, had the distinction of being a marked improvement over the first sequel, which was set in Europe and made audiences want to take a collective shower after watching it. But being better than something awful doesn’t make something good, and 1989 critics generally agreed that Christmas Vacation was a gift better left unopened.
Cut to 25 years later, and the darn movie has become a holiday classic – not respected in the same manner as It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street, perhaps, but embraced as a welcome perennial visitor to our pop-culture family. That goes for my house too – a DVD of Vacation sits on my shelf, and it’s entered into semi-regular rotation in my holiday movie canon.
Did it wear me down? Probably. I’m sure was too hard on the film when it was released, but there’s no doubt that the movie’s amiably vulgar expressions of Christmas cheer have mingled nicely with the overall sights, sounds and sentiments of the yuletide season. Mostly, though, the Christmas Vacation phenomenon is an old, familiar song: in which the experience of watching a movie for the very first time can’t begin to prepare the viewer to appreciate it through the lens of posterity.
Not every Christmas-themed movie automatically becomes a rewatchable classic – Home Alone is a lasting hit, for example, but Home Alone 2 never made the cut, and no one even remembers Home Alone 3. But Christmas Vacation, with its multigenerational tension and its will-I-make-a-nice-holiday-for-my-kids angst, has a familiarity that resonates better than, say, Macaulay Culkin’s bizarre solo adventures. Add to that the fact that the jokes themselves are now familiar – 25 years of repetition will do that – and it’s not hard to see how this movie could have worked its way into our homes … and in a bizarre fashion, into our hearts.
By objective standards, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation isn’t a very good movie. It’s junk food, and few people would argue that eating Chicken McNuggets is a good idea. But by objective standards, raising pine trees just for the purpose of cutting them down, dragging them into our homes and dangling colored glass on the branches for a few weeks is rather silly. If nothing else, the holiday season gives us all an opportunity to take our own Christmas vacation – a getaway from the obligations of objectivity, and the chance to be blissfully subjective for a while.