Music & Movies for Advent and Christmas

Prepare your heart for Christ’s birth with this Advent playlist of reflections and prayers. Watch, reflect, and share the journey!​

• Advent Sacred Music Playlist - Youtube
• Christmas Playlist - Spotify
  
  

Enjoy the Christmas movie list and commentaries from Kendra Tierney, author of Catholic All Year:
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• The Small One (1978, Disney+, 0:25, TV-PG)
  "The Small One is a classic Jungle Book-era Disney animated short film. It’s sweet and fun and has catchy, if not-always-relevant-to-the-plot musical numbers. And, spoiler alert, it’s got the Baby Jesus at the end." ~KT
  
  
• Illumination Presents: Dr. Seuss’ the Grinch (2018, Amazon, 1:26, PG)
  "We all love the 1966 classic version and most of us hate the 2000 live action version. IMHO this version is the best. Religious carols. Hilarious a capella group part. Not the usual bad guy backstory. I love this take on the Grinch. He isn’t the terror of the town. The whos shrug off his antisocial behavior. He’s isolated by his own hurt and his own choices. So accurate. All he has to do is get out of his own way to learn to love his fellow man, er, who." ~KT
  
  
• Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983, Disney+, 0:26, G)
  "This is a surprisingly good version of A Christmas Carol. I’ve watched quite a few and they have always been too badly animated, or too badly musical, or too frantic for my taste. So, even though this one is very short, and takes quite a few liberties with the plot, I’ve always really liked it. As have my kids. We love how familiar characters are cast in the story and how it manages to get Dickens’s message of redemption across with humor. There are some slightly scary parts, but it’s Goofy as the ghost of Marley, and Pete as the undertaker, so I really think all but the most sensitive kiddos would be okay with it. It’s a good starter version." ~KT
  
  
• The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992, Disney+, 1:26, G)
  "The Mickey one is a good version. But this one is my favorite. By a landslide. It’s the Muppets, so, like Mickey’s version, we’ve got familiar faces in the roles, but in this version we also get great songs, top notch live actors, and a VERY faithful adaptation of the book, complete with actual quotes. I actually think this version is also a little less scary than the Mickey one, but its more sophisticated plot may be more difficult for little kids to understand. But they won’t mind, because they’ll be watching Kermit. (P.S. it’s not animated, it’s puppets and live action, but I made the executive decision to list it here.)" ~KT
  
  
• Klaus (2019, Netflix, 1:38, PG)
  "An amusing (if mistaken) origin story of Santa. Great visuals, great voice acting, sweet message, gentle reference to an afterlife." ~KT
  
  
• Alien X-mas (2020, Netflix, 0:42, TV-Y)
  "Amazing claymation, a sweet (if secular) message of love and giving, and a Santa who wields candy cane nunchucks in “The Battle for Christmastown.” It’s awesome. (Violence is limited to snowballs and automatic ribbon machines.)" ~KT
  
  
• Prep & Landing (2009, Disney+, 0:22, TV-G) & (2010, Disney+, 0:07, TV-G)
  "These Pixar shorts feature the elves who get houses ready for Santa’s visit. 2009 & 2010 are cute and unobjectionable. (We skip the 2011 one since the plot of that one centers around hating the new baby, then deciding that you like the new baby. That’s not a concept I support.)" ~KT
  
  
• Rankin Bass Stop Motion Christmas Movies
  "We have many of these on DVD and really like them, but they’re unfortunately not easily available now, either for purchase or streaming." ~KT

Classics

• White Christmas (1954, Netflix, 2:00, TV-G) 
  "It’s got war and slapstick for the boys and dancing and romance for the girls, how could you go wrong? It’s mostly just an excuse for a bunch of musical numbers, but there is a sweet story of helping out an old buddy woven in there. Plus Phil tells Bob that what he really needs to do is get married and have nine kids." ~KT
  
  
• It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Prime, 2:10, PG) 
  "We often watch the Veggie Tales version of this story AND the classic black and white version. I HOPE my kids prefer this one, but it’s hard to tell. There are a lot of sweet, funny moments, and the message is timeless. Its theology about angels is, um, how to put this . . . totally wrong. But we just explain to our kids that people don’t become angels when they die anymore than cockroaches become horses when they die, and then we enjoy the movie. Hee-haw and Merry Christmas!" ~KT
  
  
• The Bishop’s Wife (1947, Prime, 1:50, TV-G)
  "Though centered on a Protestant Bishop and his wife and daughter, it’s a more theologically Catholic take on a movie featuring an angel who intervenes in human affairs. He’s not a person who became an angel, which is nice since that isn’t possible. I like how everyone around him is simultaneously drawn to and confounded by him. That seems accurate! It’s not as funny as It’s a Wonderful Life, though." ~KT
  
  
• The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945, DVD, 2:06, NR)
  "The second Bing Crosby movie on the list (White Christmas), we also love this classic sequel to Going My Way. It’s very funny and very Catholic, and features an adorable Christmas pageant, which makes it appropriate for the season. It would be worth watching just to hear Bing Crosby singing as Fr. O’Malley, but you also get Ingrid Bergman as Mother Superior teaching a little boy to box. And there’s a grumpy rich old coot and the sisters’ blind faith in miracles, and it’s all just lovely. It’s slower than today’s movies, of course, but my kids really think it’s funny." ~KT
  
  
• Come to the Stable (1949, Amazon, 1:34, NR)
  "Like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Bishop’s Wife, Come to the Stable seems VERY like The Bells of St. Mary’s. Come to the Stable has the advantage of being based on a very sweet true story of two French religious sisters who came to a small New England town and involved the townsfolk in helping them to build a children’s hospital. But it has the disadvantage of not having Bing Crosby for its random song insertions or quite as much humour." ~KT

More movie suggestions from Kiendra