It’s the Christmas season again, which means it’s time for a certain type of movies: Christmas movies.

They are everywhere, on TV, in the movie theatres, and I bet most of us have one or two in our DVD collection as well. There are, of course, the classics, like It’s A Wonderful Life with James Stewart, We’re No Angels with Humphrey Bogart, and I guess that even Home Alone and Christmas Vacation can already be considered classics, and each year, there’s a bunch of new ones, like this year’s Four Christmases. Among my favourites, which I try to watch every year (and yes, I do own them on DVD) are The Muppet Christmas Carol and Love Actually, and I usually watch Home Alone, Little Lord Fauntleroy and even Christmas Vacation when they are on, even though I still think that the best part about the latter is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is in it.

But if you watch these movies closely, you’ll see that something is missing from them – lesbians. In the world of Christmas movies, we simply don’t exist.

It’s something that I had never thought about up until last week, when I felt like watching a lesbian movie but also – in honour of the season – a Christmas movie, and realized that there is no such movie. The closest I could come up with was a short movie from Norway called “Hjem til jul” (“Home for Christmas”), but that’s only 4 minutes long. There’s also a lesbian character in Love Actually, but you won’t know that unless you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD.

So what could be the reason for the lack of lesbians in Christmas movies? To be honest, I have no idea. It’s not that all Christmas movies are made for children, and even if they were, not having a gay or lesbian character in a movie because of that wouldn’t be acceptable. It might be that, like so many times, we’re simply being overlooked. Because it’s not that there aren’t any possible storylines. Christmas, like every family celebration, has great potential for a coming-out story or other kinds of lesbian drama. We all know that divorce rates are higher in January, and thinking that lesbian relationships are more stable than straight relationships would be wishful thinking. Too bad that so far, no filmmakers, not even the lesbian ones, have picked up one of these potential storylines. Of course, it would be even better if there didn’t have to be drama, if the storyline would be told matter-of-factly – just some characters among others who happen to be lesbians and in love. After all, Christmas is a celebration of love, all variations of it.

I think that I’m going to put the wish for a nice lesbian Christmas movie on my wish list this year. Maybe, if there’s a lesbian Santa Clara out there, I’m sure she’ll grant it.

“MeL’s Point” will be back on December 20th, 2008. Thanks everyone for all the suggestions regarding the title of the column, if there’s going to be a new one, we’ll let you know in 2009.

Posted on eurOut on December 6th, 2008