The Home, Alone

On the greatest Christmas movie of all time

The only thing better than watching Christmas movies is arguing about Christmas movies. What counts? Is Die Hard in? (yes, obviously.) What about Die Hard 2? (nah.) Lord of the Rings? (ooh, tell me more). While You Were Sleeping? (sure, count it.) Spider Man: No Way Home? (alright, now we’re just being silly.)

The reason there are so many arguments about this category is that almost anything with snow and good and evil is a plausible candidate. To understand the contours of the category better, we should really isolate the subgenre at the genre’s core: the Santa movie.

Santa movies all share a familiar plot: ambitious professionals, caught between their family life and their worldly pursuits, struggle to focus on “what matters most.” Enter the Santa figure, whose jolly demeanor and festive wisdom thaws the ice surrounding their hearts and helps them see The True Meaning of Christmas™. The Christmas Carol is a type of ur-text of the Santa movie, Miracle on 34th Street is the quintessential example, and It’s a Wonderful Life and Elf are among its most famous variants.

At their core, Santa movies are dramas of faith. The protagonist’s transformation hinges on whether they will muster enough belief in Santa and what he represents to be transformed—and, subsequently, to be richly rewarded. For Santa is more than just a symbol of Christmas; he comes bearing a bag of goodies for all good boys and girls. If these protagonists fully accept the reality of Santa, or his spiritual equivalent, the windows of the heaven (read: the North Pole) are opened up, and their reward far exceeds their initial hopes. Buddy and Michael not only get their dad around more, but Walter Hobbs is freed from his miserable job and launches a successful small-time book publishing. George Bailey, his life a series of professional false starts, ultimately resigns himself to the consequences of debtor’s prison, only to be suddenly flush with far more cash than the $8000 that went missing.

That combination of spiritual conversion and material windfall gives these Santa movies a distinctly American Protestant spirit. Again, Miracle on 34th Street, one of the most WASPy movies ever made, is the archetypal example. Finding the holiday too commercialized, Kris Kringle commits himself to making Christmas special for Macy’s customers by telling them where they can go to find the best deals—a counterintuitive move of anti-commercialism that proves to be a brilliant marketing strategy. In the end, rather than requiring a choice between family and fortune, Santa movies celebrate the synthesis of consumer capitalism and the Christmas Spirit. Consider how, in the 1994 remake, Judge Harper is persuaded to side with Kringle’s belief that he is in fact Santa Claus after he is reminded by Susan that the dollar bill is embossed with “In God We Trust”—if it’s good enough for the U.S. Treasury, it’s good enough for me!

Santa movies are not only the core of the Christmas movie genre—they also embody the paradox at the heart of the American holiday itself. Santa movies bemoan the loss of the True Meaning of Christmas, but what they recover is not the holiday’s religious origins but the modern holiday’s distinctive combination of domestic charm and material indulgence. They are symptomatic of the disease they bemoan.

Whence, then, the True Christmas Movie? Films like The Nativity Story (2005) or The Star (2017) that depict the literal events of Christ’s birth are obvious contenders, but they are not commercially successful enough to enter the canon. A Charlie Brown Christmas, which rejects Christmas pageantry for simple gospel narration, is another good option, but it is too underdeveloped and slight (the Great American Novel cannot be a novella). The Christmas Story is undeniably charming, but it is more about nostalgia than the idea of Christmas itself. The Grinch might be a dark horse candidate, seeing as it preserves a vision of Christmas sans Santa, but by the end, it is very much in the Santa-movie mold.

No, the true Christmas movie has to be one that is widely beloved, that rejects the Santa mythos, and that speaks to both the modern and religious meanings of Christmas. And there is only one film that answers all of these criteria: Home Alone.

For one, Home Alone is decidedly not a Santa movie. Kevin does meet “Santa,” but everything about this St. Nick—his fake beard, his alcohol-masking Tic-Tacs, his broken-down Honda that is no more likely to run than a sleigh is to fly—screams that Santa is not coming to Kevin’s rescue. In fact, Santa might just be the source of Kevin’s problems. The only other depiction of Santa in the film is a glaring, moody visage embedded in the McCallister’s front-door wreath, bouncing fitfully in the stormy night that brings about Kevin’s ill-fated wish for his family to disappear. This shot of Santa appears after Kevin, moping in his attic bed, silently pining that he could have his house to himself. If anything, Santa Claus is a malevolent trickster, a monkey’s paw from the North Pole, coming in the dark of night to give rotten kids a punishing lesson in the dangers of unchecked desire.

Plus, it wouldn’t make sense for Home Alone to be a Santa movie, since there is no missing piece in Kevin’s life. He has both parents, more than enough siblings, and a suburban Chicago home that even Susan Walker couldn’t have dreamed up. To top it off, his whole family is going to Paris! What more could he possibly want?

That trip to Paris might capture the problem in the McCallister universe: everything is great, and nobody’s happy. The McCallisters’s home is the epitome of the Christmas aesthetic, and yet they leave it all to chase after holiday delights abroad. And so do all their neighbors. One of the (all too convenient) plot points that keeps Kevin’s adventure going is that all of the McCallister’s neighbors are away from their homes and unable to check in on Kevin. Every house on the block is empty. “Sorry, Mom,” Kevin’s sister mutters, after another failed phone call, “nothing but a bunch of answering machines.”

Home Alone exposes what the Santa movies try to reconcile: that the fusion of commercial materialism and Victorian domesticity at the heart of the American Christmas is unsustainable and spiritually bankrupt. The McCallisters and everyone on their block have everything that the American Christmas encourages us to aspire for—a hearth and home sheltered against the evils of the world, filled to the brim with toys and goodies—and yet it is not enough. They are all jetting off in search of more thrills.

Into this spiritual vacuum enters the Wet Bandits, Marv and Harry. It’s unclear what these half-wits do outside of the Christmas season, what petty burglaries they try to pull off in, say, mid-to-late May. But their crimes are a perfect counter to the suburban ennui that the McCallister’s neighborhood faces. Like the evil spirits of Jesus’s parable, they wait for the occupants to clean, organize, and vacate their homes, only to take possession of these abodes and leave them in greater shambles than ever. Their calling card—clogging and the drains and turning on the taps, filling the houses with water—puts the moral fortitude of these suburban homes to the test. The rains come down, the floods come up, and the houses on the sand wash away.

The problem that Home Alone is wrestling with is not negligent parents or petty criminals. It is reckoning with a 1980s that promised Americans fulfillment through picture-perfect families and material prosperity, only for them to wake up in 1990 and wonder why, even with both, they were still miserable. Like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, two other John Hughes movie set in Chicago, Home Alone is about kids ironically delighting in the indulgent spoils of America’s twentieth-century economic triumph, enjoying the goods while recognizing that the world passed down to them by their parents’ generation echoes when you knock on it. Ferris lip-syncing “Twist and Shout,” the Sherman students rocking out to “We Are Not Alone,” Kevin getting down to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”—what else is there for these kids to do but dance while the world burns?

Santa movies depend on their protagonists finally accepting the world of faith: George Bailey praying his heart out in the bar, Walter Hobbs finally joining his family in the Christmas sing-along. By letting go of their self-reliance and giving in to the Christmas Spirit, they unlock the grace that rescues them from their spiritual plight. Home Alone, a movie about a family of Irish Catholics, rejects this type of private, inner conversion, locating salvation instead in sacramental community. Following his pointless attempt to get Santa to bail him out, Kevin wanders the streets, watching through windows at families gathering in their homes, aching for that type of union which his own kin lacks. With no where else to go, Kevin enters the only other place that will have him on Christmas Eve, the setting of the film’s most inspired scene—and a place that is, ironically, almost entirely absent from all major Christmas films: a church.

As Kevin wanders down the aisle, we find the church to be filled with music but almost entirely abandoned. The choir is rehearsing for that night’s Midnight Mass, and presumably the audience are parents waiting to take their kids home, but the shot of empty pews and scattered parishioners gives the effect of a church filled with lonely souls. Kevin sits down and sees across the aisle one such soul, Old Man Marley, who comes to talk with Kevin. Here we learn that Marley has come to this rehearsal to hear his granddaughter sing, since at the night’s service, he is not welcome. “At church?!” Kevin gasps, who has no doubt wished on many a Sunday that he was barred from entrance. Marley clarifies that he meant not welcome with his son. “You are always welcome at church,” he assures Kevin.

It turns out that, despite their vast differences in age and circumstances, Kevin and Marley have found themselves at church for basically the same reason. As a movie widely popular among the generation that came of age during the dawn of the Internet, it is only natural for Home Alone to be the subject of several online fan theories: Kevin’s dad is in the mob, Uncle Frank has hired the Wet Bandits to rob his brother, Kevin grows up to become the Jigsaw Killer. One is that Marley is actually Kevin in the future, who has travelled back in time to help Kevin against the Wet Bandits. This one is too cute by half: Marley clearly is Kevin in the future—he is a symbol of the life that awaits Kevin if the kid does not come to appreciate his family. Like Kevin, Marley has spoken too harshly and waited too long to patch things up. “We lost our tempers, and I said I didn't care to see him anymore. He said the same, and we haven't spoken to each other since.” That about sums it up for both of them.

Both Kevin and Marley have come to church because they have no families that will welcome them. It is there that they find in each other a surrogate family that prepares them to re-enter their circles of kinship. By talking with Marley, Kevin is able to work through his reconciliation with his mother. That conversation transforms Kevin; he is inspired to not give up on his house and the family it represents, rushing home to make preparations. Like an exorcist (now that’s a fan theory!) expelling demons (he does, after all, begin the night’s events with a prayer, flanked by angelic candlesticks) or Christ casting out the moneylenders, Kevin proceeds to expel the Wet Bandits and their greed from his house, purging both them and the mess they have unleashed before retiring for Christmas Eve night. The home, cleansed of wickedness, is ready to welcome his family’s return. Kevin wakes in hopeful anticipation that Santa has brought his family back after all…only to realize, with painful disillusion, that Santa did not come last night. All his work was for naught.

Except right after he closes the door, a moving truck pulls up, his mother inside. For while Kevin has been doing his part to restore comity, his mother Kate has been working out her own salvation by desperately trying to travel back from Paris to Chicago. Like a soul struggling through Purgatory, Kate purges herself of all her comforts and riches, a weary pilgrim pawning off her jewelry and wealth on an elderly couple for passage back to her spiritual home. That jewelry does not come back ten times over, nor is her Paris vacation restored—she had to make actual sacrifices if she wanted to bring her family back together. In her journey’s final stage, she seals her sacrifice by confessing her sins of parental failure before God and, well, not a priest, but the Polka King of the Midwest, so close enough. Like Kevin, Kate couldn’t just wish her way back home by riding the sleigh of a gift-giving miracle man; she had to trundle through the night in the back of a U-Haul, not knowing whether she would even find her child safe. Her hug with Kevin at the very end is especially poignant because we know how hard both have labored to make that moment possible.

Kevin’s reunion with his family takes place at the same time that Marley is reconciling with his family outside. Their smile through the window, in mutual recognition of what has been restored to them, seals the unique bond they forged that propelled them to reunite with their families. By seeking help outside of kinship, by turning to their congregational family, they were able to make good with their parents and child, respectively. In the end, for being a rambunctious comedy, Home Alone has a pretty didactic message: the home, alone, is insufficient to protect families from the barrage temptations unleashed by materialism. It must rely on the church for its members, fragmented by the modern world, to find renewed strength to fortify the ties that bind them together. What Home Alone shows is that it is only through the combination of hearth and alter that families can protect themselves from those most fearsome threats of the modern world: conspicuous consumption, spiritual ennui, and Joe Pesci.

Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.