When I last wrote about Christmas movies I gave a thumbs-up to Tim Allen and a thumbs-down to Jim Carrey. My favorite movies have all of my favorite actors – my children! I am writing this so that they are all in one place and I can find them easily.

How did we begin this tradition? Desperation!

December 2015. We moved to Texas just two weeks before Christmas. Our moving truck did not arrive for another week. Yet we learned a thing or two about southern hospitality with the many dinner invitations that we received. We were even invited for Christmas Eve!! This invitation came with an assignment. Four or five families would be there and could we please plan some entertainment to share? We had just listened to the beautiful music at our church Christmas program and were feeling way too intimated to try and bring along any possible rendition of Christmas entertainment to share with a house full of complete strangers. So what could we contribute? We had five of our children home for the holidays and decided to create a Christmas video.

We did the entire production in a day – and most of this time was spent trying to come up with an idea. nevertheless I do believe that this first one is our best. Maybe because it is A Christmas Carol which is hands-down my favorite Christmas movie. How did it go over? Hahahaha. We still talk about how crazy our new friends (who were still strangers) probably thought that we were. We figured out that they may have never seen A Christmas Carol which would make it seem even more weird. Besides – who makes a movie to show at a Christmas party? No one else laughed but we did. We loved it. We still do.

2016 – We decided to try it again. This time without the party so that we could just enjoy watching ourselves by ourselves. We borrowed the title Home Alone but this time it was Dad who was left behind.

2017 – We gathered with Nathan in Las Vegas this year for Thanksgiving and when we got a little bored we decided to make a Thanksgiving movie. We created Theo the Turkey and had a lot of fun chasing that silly turkey around the Red Rock Canyon. It was much more fun to create than it is to watch. I think we should remake it by setting it on double-speed so we can finish watching it twice as quickly…

2018 – Skipping Christmas. Nathan was living in Qatar and Natalie was in Florida. We decided to “skip Christmas” and gather in eastern Wyoming. We had the most idyllic holiday ever! We spent Christmas Eve in the Black Hills of South Dakota where we enjoyed Mt. Rushmore (I think there were about ten tourists including us) and bought a cute little carved bear. The snow began falling and we spent the rest of our week snowed in just as we had hoped. Our gifts consisted mostly of flannel shirts, movies to watch and games to play. With this simple plan in mind we finished up our video and sent it out via social media to our friends in lieu of Christmas cards. My favorite parts of this film are the cameo appearances by several of our dear Texas friends.

2019 – We didn’t have a plan and with the move, etc. it seemed like a good year to skip the video. But you know how that goes – we came up with a last minute idea. I actually haven’t seen this one too many times so I don’t have much commentary. I remember that we were working on transitions and involving the entire family again. …So I just watched it again. It is random scenes of our family celebrating Christmas. I like it more than anticipated.

2020 – I will post our new video after it is released on Christmas. We were actually all in one place for a couple days last month and had a lot of fun putting it together. Last night Greg sent us out a few movie posters which I will share:

Run! Run! Run! As Fast As You Can!!!