It's a Wonderful Life is celebrated as a classic American film, one about small-town ingenuity, community values, and seeing the value in the most difficult of circumstances. It is also, perhaps more notably, central to the canon of American Christmas films. While only the very end of the film takes place on Christmas itself, its exploration of generosity and the human condition, as well as the fact that it first became widely popular in the 1970s when it was aired on cable during the holiday season, has solidified its status as a Christmas classic.
Just what constitutes a "Christmas film" is widely debated. While some suggest that a film taking place on or around Christmas qualifies it as a Christmas film, others contend that Christmas films must concern Christmas more thematically. The list of films that qualify as Christmas films includes quite a variety of films, from the Bruce Willis action thriller Die Hard to adaptations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol to the Harry Potter films to Bridget Jones' Diary.
In an article in The Ringer about the precise rubric of what qualifies a "Christmas movie" inspired by the controversy surrounding the classification of Die Hard and Die Hard 2 (which both take place on Christmas Eve), Justin Charity breaks it down. He suggests that Christmas movies can fall into a number of categories: movies about Christmas; movies set during Christmastime, though not necessarily concerned with the holiday as a matter of importance; and movies especially popular with viewers during Christmastime. To conclude his article, Charity writes, "The radical conclusion of this manifesto is that you might regard pretty much anything that lots of people are likely to watch during the holiday season as a Christmas movie."
