Break out the eggnog

American Thanksgiving time has put holiday movie season into full swing.

I'm sure everyone has their favorites. Every year I see the listings for Miracle on 34th street, and It's a Wonderful Life. The Grinch. All those. But those are not my favorites. Nor have they ever been. I've never seen either of the former. And I don't think I ever watched the classic version of the latter either. Here are some of my favorites:

• Home Alone - I haven't watched it for the last few years, but for a while there it was a staple. Even Home Alone 2 is really great. I love the hijinks with the dummys rigged to ropes so he can move them around. And Joe Pesci - probably my favorite character he's ever played.
• National Lampoons - The rodent in the Xmas tree. The dried out turkey. The dickey. Enough said.
• Love Actually - I always love movies where all the stories are intertwined, but this one does it with humor and warm fuzzies instead of horror and irony. Plus, it's a relatively new movie, and since I usually only watch it during the holidays, I barely remember what happens in it.
• Stepmom - although mildly depressing, it still leaves you feeling pretty good. But in a realistic kind of way. I think this one takes the cake as SB's favorite holiday movie, but don't tell anybody that.
• The Family Man - No, not the Family Guy, The Family Man. It's kind of like A Christmas Carol, but not. There are cute kids in it. SB and I actually agreed that if maybe you could choose which kids you could have, we would choose the little girl in this movie. But since you can't choose which kids you can have, we will forego all that and get a baby Himalayan kitten. (okay, we didn't agree to get the kitten, but it was another moment for me to sneak in a bit of my cost/benefit analysis of the whole situation).

I was planning on posting this list anyway, but when we sat down to dinner tonight, we discovered that The Family Man was on TV. After celebrating American Thanksgiving yesterday by cooking a whole turkey dinner for just the two of us, I must say, it is putting me in a rather festive mood.

I must also say that my mood would be even more festive if we had a DVR and could have recorded this movie off of network television and watched it tomorrow while fast-forwarding the commercials.....