It's that time of year again...

Time to start cracking out the Christmas films!

We've got a little tradition of collecting Christmas films which we then go on to watch during the run up to Christmas. We've now got so many of them that we have to start watching them in November in order to get through them all, and each year we pick a different order to watch them in, just to mix things up.

The first year we were moved into our new home we watched them in order of the year they were made. This was good fun because it meant that we started with the oldest; the likes of Holiday Inn and White Christmas, then gradually moved forward until we were watching Disney's A Christmas Carol right before the big day. It was also interesting to see how things changed over time, the new technologies that crept in and some of the little bits which were kind of advanced for the time they were made.

Then last year I suggested Mr Click pick the order we watch them in, strongly hinting that I'd like to watch them in order of length (either longest to shortest or vice versa). He suggested alphabetical order and as I'd picked the last order we went with that.

This worked out well too although we did end up with a Christmas Carol week, then a little while after that we had another little batch of Christmas Carols. I quite enjoyed seeing how they all differed from each other; there are certain bits that every version, whether it's Muppets or CGI or live action all share, and then there are other bits which only occasionally get included.

This year it was my turn to pick the order we'd watch the films in and the collection has grown somewhat over the last couple of years. On one shopping trip alone we managed to pick up two more versions of A Christmas Carol so I decided to go for the order of length option that I'd wanted to do the year before.

I've also had to divide our films into Christmas Films and Not Quite Christmas Films. The Not Quite Christmas Films are the ones which you can watch in the run up to Christmas. The obvious ones are things like The Holiday and Love Actually, but there are others I associate with Christmas, like ITV's adaptation of Ballet Shoes from 2007. Christmas does feature briefly but it's not the whole part of the story or it originally aired around Christmas time.

All the Not Quite Christmas Films are scheduled for viewing in November (we've already watched two of them) then the Christmas Films will start in December. We've got The Snowman and Father Christmas at the beginning and we'll finish with White Christmas and It's A Wonderful Life.

And last Thursday we watched our traditional first film of the run up to Christmas; The Nightmare Before Christmas. We watched it with our Chinese takeaway and it was pretty much perfect.

Do you have Christmas films that help to make Christmas for you?