Two days before Christmas, in a bout of Elf on the Shelf movie-induced mania, I switched off the TV.
“It’s time we watch some real movies!” I exclaimed to my thoroughly displeased children.
The complaints poured in, but I was determined.
“We are watching one of my favorites, Meet Me in St. Louis!”
For those who haven’t seen it, it is a classic movie musical from 1944 starring Judy Garland and set in St. Louis in the months preceding the 1904 World Fair. If you know nothing else about it, maybe you’ve heard of the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which was originally written for this movie.
We watched it over the course of a few evenings, and by the end, my kids were singing the titular song all over the house and asking to listen to the soundtrack in the car.
“What other movies are like this?” they asked.
I suppose even they can recognize that Moana doesn’t quite hit the same note, both literally and metaphorically.
What has ensued is a string of classic movie musicals. Right now, we are working our way through The Sound of Music, and I am already planning the future lineup of kid-friendly classics.
I keep coming back to the idea though . . . Why are “the classics” so revered or feel so important? I’m not talking about just movies, but classic songs, books, church hymns, and the like are often seen as loftier or more important. A piece of me rebels against that notion. I have read plenty of modern books that strike my heart as deeply as A Tale of Two Cities, and while I love The Beatles or even jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald, so much of my musical taste is informed by being an angsty teenager in the mid-2000s. But despite this rebellion and with no offense to Mr. Michael Bublé, there is something about listening to Bing Crosby croon “White Christmas” that modern artists cannot touch, even if you can appreciate their musicality and talent.
I am no social scientist and can only anecdotally share my theories for the appeal of the classics. But I wonder if there is something about nostalgia—about the interconnectedness we feel with a movie, a novel, a song that has been carried through the generations—that resonates with us deeply. As a mother, I spend so much of my time curating my children’s experiences. I am careful about the content that is poured into their little brains, the adventures we go on, how we spend our holidays together. Ultimately, I am trying to give them a deeply seated sense of self that is rooted in the values we share and the memories that we make; hopefully, they’ll go into the world confident in who they are as children of God, but also in their identities as my husband’s and my children.
Similarly, the classics can make us feel connected to the people who came before us. I remember being a kid sitting next to my mom watching Singing in the Rain, a movie I know my grandmother also loved. This memory helped me define myself a bit in a world where each of us and our stories are so different. And while Singing in the Rain is an awesome movie—and how can you beat the talent of Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor?—I think I mostly love it because it formed such an integral part of how I felt known and loved in my family. And it set me apart from the myriad kids at school whose moms didn’t sing “Good Morning” to them every day. (It drove me nuts at the time, and yet, I sometimes find myself doing it to my own kids.)
As Catholics, we have been blessed with a rich tradition dating back 2,000 years. We have the writings of Saints who lived shortly after Christ, hymns we still sing regularly that are easily hundreds of years old, art and architecture from nearly every movement in history. What a rich story we could tell about where we come from! And while modern artists, for example, are putting out beautiful songs worshipping the Lord, something about singing “Tantum Ergo” (written by S. Thomas Aquinas in 1264) plucks strings in my soul that I often forget are there.
The Church has given us a family of origin, one that leads right back to Christ Himself. We can identify ourselves in the Sacred Scriptures, but also in the lives and spirituality of the Saints, the deep theological musings of countless writers, and the beauty of the liturgy itself. Whatever our identity in our own families may be, this Catholic family has carefully curated a beautiful and diverse set of experiences, so we can find touches of ourselves throughout the history of our faith. Likewise, we are called to imitate the Church in replicating, in a small way, a unique family identity rooted in the faith but also in our individual uniqueness—where we have come from and what skills, passions, and values we want to transmit to our kids.No one would argue that one must watch classic movies or read classic books in order to be a functional human being. And whatever traditions you or your family of origin have created and passed down are good and beautiful because they are yours, so please don’t think that your children will lack rich cultural experiences without My Fair Lady. But creating traditions with our family of origin, both in our domestic homes and in the Church, help us to know ourselves and our identity. As we curate our own identities with our families—using the classics or not—let us remember that doing so is an act of holiness that Mother Church still models for us.