The great thing about Christmas is that it’s yours to do with whatever you like.  Some people just can’t abide the holidays and my heart goes out to them.  I understand.  I’m an atheist, a secular humanist, a realist, at times even a cynic.  I get how galling the prefab mirth and canned bonhomie can be to the disenfranchised, the bitter and the angry.  And yet I love Christmas and I wonder sometimes if the haters are just hating someone else’s idea of what the holiday should be.   Make the season your own, I say.  Personalize it. Brand it.  Instead of holly, deck them halls with red chili peppers!  Instead of eggnog, guzzle some Sprecher’s real ginger ale, an amber lager or a crisp Riesling!  And instead of that infernal Yule Log, fire up one of these babies…

A fire breaks out about 1 minute into this clip from THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973), Christopher Lee’s swan song as The Undying Count for Hammer Studios.  The fire quickly spreads from an upstairs room loaded with vintage computer equipment down to the parlor, where Dracula has unleashed a strain of bubonic plague.  As secondary characters perish in the inferno, Peter Cushing’s plucky old Van Helsing chases Dracula out to the lawn, where he traps the vampire in a tangle of hawthorne berries.  Dracula is incapacitated due to the fact (or, if you will, belief) that this plant provided Jesus Christ with his crown of thorns.  (Hawthorne berries also contain powerful antitoxidants and naturalbioflavonoids that support the health of the entire cardiovascular system.)  While the Count is helpless, Van Helsing stakes him with a piece of picket fence.  This clip has everything for Christmas and is decidedly sans treacle.

Don’t think THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) is a Christmas movie?  Well, if you watch it at Christmas it is!  This is one of those movies I can watch over and over and half of the charm is the damned fire, which puts me in my happy place.  If you can forget momentarily (or for 2 hours and 45 minutes… 4 hours if you watch this on American Movie Classics) that people have actually died this way and instead enjoy the vicarious ride, THE TOWERING INFERNO is a splendid companion for the long winter nights.  You can even turn the sound down so you don’t have to hear all that screaming and just bask in its rosy glow.

There’s a bit of blabbing on either side of this clip from André De Toth’s HOUSE OF WAX (1953) but in the middle is a splendid  wax museum fire with Vincent Price smack dab in the middle o’it.  Nobody dies here – of course, Vincent Price’s character suffers, you might say, a fate worse than death — but beyond that the only casualties are a bunch of dummies.  And they burn up real good.  And melt, even, like the Nazis at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981).  And the soundtrack is rich in crackling, which is one of the key elements of a proper Yule Log.

In this bit from Disney’s THE BLACK HOLE (1979), a handful of astronauts and a robot who looks like a salt shaker travel through the eponymous deformation and turn up in Hell – damned souls, sulfurous pits and all.  While not boasting a traditional fire, this sequence is nevertheless charmingly incarnadine, thanks to the eternal flames of damnation.  Curl up next to someone you love and enjoy the show.

Mind you, it takes 8m 15s of this 9m clip from WHITE HEAT (1949) to get to the sparks but the payoff is huge.  If you have editing software, you might even isolate these fiery final frames in a continuous loop and make your own anti-Yule Log out of it.  If you’re feeling bitter and ill-used and generally cheesed off by the holidays, then Cody Jarret’s big finish ought to be just what the doctor ordered.  Come Boxing Day, you may not be any richer or wiser but you will have made Christmas your own.  And that, my friends, is something to celebrate!