My Ten Favourite Christmas-Adjacent Films

A personal selection of films set at Christmas that aren’t about Christmas

The Apartment (1960). Credit: United Artists

What exactly constitutes a “Christmas-adjacent” film? The lines get rather blurry, but to be clear, this countdown of favourites will not include any of the movies I selected for my ten favourite Christmas films list. The likes of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Scrooge (1951), Gremlins (1984), and Die Hard (1988) will not be featured here, as they centre specifically on Christmas.

In contrast, a Christmas-adjacent film should be partly or totally set around the festive season but it cannot be directly about Christmas. Nor should it deal with themes traditionally associated with Christmas. Santa Claus cannot be a character in the cast, nor can elves or reindeer. There should be no getting home just in time for Christmas Day. No learning to appreciate your family or spouse in ways traditionally associated with Christmas films. No lifelong grudges or feuds overcome due to an abundance of goodwill. No learning the lessons of Christmas past, present, and future. No discovering the reason for the season. And definitely, no angelic interventions showing protagonists what the world would have been like if they’d never been born to undertake a lifetime of selfless acts.

With that in mind, here’s a countdown of my ten favourite Christmas-adjacent films. I should add that this selection adheres to my strict ten-year rule in terms of how long a film should “mature” before I consider it a favourite or a classic (or both).