North Carolina’s Favorite Christmas Movie: Do You Agree?
The Christmas season is so much fun and one of the best things about Christmas is the many, many Christmas movies that you can find on TV, streaming channels, and movies at the theater. As a matter fact, Christmas Day is the second most popular theater movie day next to Thanksgiving Day. That is why so many big movies come out during the Christmas season.
Many of us have our favorite Christmas movies, and that has developed some Christmas traditions of watching a certain movie on Christmas Eve every single year. For my family, that movie has traditionally been It’s A Wonderful Life and in later years, the Will Ferrell movie Elf has been our go-to movie at Christmas.
State By State
Eleven states across the U.S. like the movie Elf as their holiday movie. In South Carolina and Wyoming, their favorite Christmas movie is It’s A Wonderful Life. Other Christmas movie favorites are Home Alone, The Night Before Christmas, and of course, one of the biggest Christmas movies of all time, Die Hard – just kidding. That’s what my husband says is the best Christmas movie of all time.
Newsweek recently did a poll saying which state had which Christmas movie as their favorite during the season. For North Carolina, that movie would be A Christmas Story.
North Carolina’s Holiday Movie of Choice
A Christmas Story is a 1983 Christmas comedy based on the 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, with some elements from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters. It stars Melinda Dillon, Darren McGavin, and Peter Billingsley, and follows a young boy and his family’s misadventures during Christmas time in December 1940.
A Christmas Story received positive reviews from critics. Filmed partly in Canada, the film earned two Canadian Genie Awards in 1984. Widely considered a holiday classic in the United States and Canada, it has been shown in a marathon annually on TNT since 1997 and on TBS since 2004 titled “24 Hours of A Christmas Story”, consisting of 12 consecutive airings of the film from the evening of Christmas Eve to the evening of Christmas Day.
In 2012, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Sequels
The film spawned three sequels. The first, My Summer Story was released in 1994. The second, entitled A Christmas Story 2, was released straight to DVD in 2012. A third sequel, entitled A Christmas Story Christmas, was released on HBO Max in 2022 and features most of the original cast returning.
