About a decade ago I started watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation more often each December than any other holiday movie. I’ve been meaning to explore why this is ever since I started this blog in 2018, which is right around the same time I discovered food writer Michael Ruhlman’s aged eggnog recipe. And this, dear reader, is how a Drink & a Movie pairing is born! To begin with the former, this is the specific eggnog that I make every year as one of our family’s holiday traditions. I don’t remember where I first came across it, but considering that planning ahead and preserved foods are two of my favorite things in the world, I imagine it was love at first sight! It also allows plenty of room for variation, so it never become boring, and someday if I come into a pile of money at just the right time I’m totally going to try it with a single malt from Oban as suggested in the notes section of Ruhlman’s blog post. The toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue (which is a fantastic way to utilize the egg whites that don’t go into the nog) is a twist on the brown sugar bourbon meringue published on the blog Proportional Plate a few years ago, with toasted sugar a la Stella Parks (cooked for three hours to a light ivory color) replacing the brown and a little “help from Jack Daniels.” Here’s how we made the batch pictured below:
12 egg yolks
2 cups granulated sugar
1 liter bourbon (Maker’s Mark)
4 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup Cognac or brandy (Pierre Ferrand 1840)
1/2 cup dark rum (Goslings Black Seal)
Whisk egg yolks and sugar together in a large bowl until well-blended and creamy using a stand mixer or by hand, then add remaining ingredients and stir or whisk to combine. Transfer mixture to a one-gallon glass jar or multiple smaller jars and place in the refrigerator for 30 days. Serve in a moose-shaped glass topped with a dollop of toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue and garnished with freshly-ground nutmeg.
Ruhlman correctly observes that this is a boozy concoction and it’s also quite rich, so you’ll want to go easy, but this is a feature not a bug as far as I’m concerned: if something takes up space in my fridge for a month, I want it to last awhile! Dark rum adds the molasses notes that I’m looking for in a winter beverage, but you could substitute Smith & Cross if you want to highlight the funkiness which I otherwise find surprisingly mild: the real benefit of aging is that it allows all the flavors to marry. You could also, of course, use Jack as your primary base spirit if you wanted to forgo the meringue but maintain the Christmas Vacation connection.
Speaking of which, here’s a picture of the Warner Home Video Special Edition DVD release which hangs out in a box in a basement with all of our other Christmas movies for most of the year:
It can also be streamed via Max with a subscription or Apple TV and Prime Video for a rental fee.
On June 21, 1987 the New York Times published an interview with Stanley Kubrick by Francis X. Clines which began with the legendary auteur praising a series of recent Michelob beer commercials: “they’re just boy-girl, night-fun, leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed.” The person who directed them was one Jeremiah S. Chechik, and according to a 2016 Slash Film oral history by Blake Harris, his phone started ringing off the hook the next day. Less than two years later he was directing his first feature film. “Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for,” Kubrick went on to tell Clines, and Christmas Vacation is no exception, but as Dave Kehr noted in a contemporary review for the Chicago Tribune, it definitely does exhibit a “fine sense of timing.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in my favorite scene. Hapless patriarch Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) has found himself trapped in a cold attic while his family goes shopping:
While searching for warm clothing, he finds a box of home movies:
The scene which follows is a smidge under two minutes long and begins with a 37-second lateral tracking shot which brings Clark into the right third of the frame with a film projector in the foreground:
Then swings around to show us what he’s watching from over his shoulder:
There’s a cut to head-on shot of Clark occupying the left two-thirds of the screen and the light from the projector filling the rest which lasts about three seconds:
Then a cut to a title card followed by approximately twelve seconds of home movie footage starring people identifiable as younger versions of characters from Christmas Vacation:
This sequence repeats itself with very similar timing, but this time the camera also tracks in on Clark slightly:
Cut to an exterior shot of the rest of the Griswolds arriving home:
Then back to twelve more seconds of home movie footage followed by another ten seconds spent tracking in to an even tighter close-up of Clark’s face:
Cut to a shot of Clark’s wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) coming up the stairs with an armful of presents which ends with a close-up of her gloved handing grasping for the chain one pulls to open the attic:
Followed by one last close-up of Clark which holds for just a second or two before the music abruptly ends and he falls through the floor:
Considered against the entire sweep of film history, Chechik and crew aren’t doing anything original in this scene, but it stands out within the realm of holiday movies because it finds a perfect balance between sentimentality and slapstick. The pratfall at the end of this scene is funny because it’s surprising: we know something is coming, but not what, since we have no way of knowing that Clark set his projector up right on top of the attic door. Meanwhile, the 2:1 (after the initial tracking shot) ratio of documentary evidence of what the “fun, old-fashioned family Christmas” that he’s trying to recreate looked like to his emotional responses to it helps us understand what he’s struggling to achieve elsewhere in the film and why. Last but not least, the marriage of these images to Ray Charles’s “That Spirit of Christmas” is absolutely perfect.
Music is a crucial aspect of a number of other scenes as well. Angelo Badalamenti’s use of a drum to accompany Clark’s reaction to his son Rusty’s (Johnny Galecki) question “did you bring a saw?”
And then a lone, melancholy (French?) horn playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” over footage of the tree they picked out tied to the top of the Griswold’s “front-wheel drive sleigh” is why this gag works:
And the decision to let the rendition of “Silent Night” which plays over footage of the rest of the family asleep in their beds end before the shot of Clark on his ladder underneath a huge moon re-checking each of the thousands of bulbs which failed to light earlier in the evening makes him seem even more cold and lonely:
Which brings me back to the question I mentioned at the outset of this post: why did I all of a sudden become much more interested in Christmas Vacation about ten years ago? After all, although I wouldn’t say I “grew up” with this film, it is one I watched for the first time as a child, when family lore has it that I started bawling my eyes out after Aunt Bethany’s (Mae Questel) cat meets its demise:
In a contemporary review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington observed that Chechik and screenwriter John Hughes “deliberately mix up horror movies and sentimental family comedies in their imagery.” He’s specifically talking about this scene near the end of the film when Clark “fixes the newel post”:
Which, per Wilmington, “fuses imagery from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ in a single visual gag,” a connection we are prepared to make by an earlier scene in which Clark dons a hockey match before cutting his tree down to size:
Wilmington is dead-on when he notes that point is to underscore the “fiery obsessiveness behind [Clark’s] desire, constantly thwarted, to construct the ideal Christmas.” The key is that the childhood holidays immortalized in film strips Clark finds in his attic weren’t perfect–as he says to his father (John Randolph) a bit later on, “all our holidays were always such a mess.” His desire to improve upon them comes from a good place: he wants to give his family an experience that they’ll still remember fondly 30 years later, just as he was moved to tears by images of “Xmas 1955.” But it’s also at its core a selfish project and thus not one that he necessarily deserves to be celebrated for. The final line of Christmas Vacation is one I think of often when we host holiday get-togethers. As a chaotic Christmas Eve improbably ends with everyone happily singing and dancing:
Clark and Ellen share a kiss outside:
She joins the rest of the family inside, leaving him alone. “I did it,” he says with a smile:
One way to interpret this is as further evidence that Clark is delusional. But another, more charitable explanation is that he has finally realized that the work is the reward, which I think would be enough to make this a movie about hosting Christmas and hospitality in general. It hardly seems like a coincidence that I would really begin appreciating Christmas Vacation at the same time I acquired in-laws and planning seasonal gatherings became a prominent part of my life.
I thought about ending this post with a more in-depth discussion of the eggnog scenes, but although “it’s good, it’s good” is invariably what I say whenever I quaff this particular beverage:
It’s really nothing more than a prop for Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid (who plays Cousin Eddie) and a showcase for the glassware so delightfully cheesy that we just had to have it:
Another option would be to call out the incredible ensemble cast that plays the Griswold grandparents, which in addition to John Randolph as Clark, Sr. also includes Diane Ladd as Clark’s mother, E.G. Marshall as Ellen’s father, and Doris Roberts (who I mentioned in my September, 2022 Drink & a Movie post about Hester Street) as her mother:
Or these ridiculous tracksuits worn by the Griswold’s yuppie neighbors Todd (Nicholas Guest) and Margot (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss):
Or Brian Doyle-Murray’s bad boss for the ages Frank Shirley:
Or one of the other lines we quote over and over again each December like “lotta sap in here. It looks great! Little full, lotta sap.”
Instead, I’ll conclude with a question: what in the world are we supposed to make of the fact that the animated opening credit sequence appears to show that Santa’s hat has a skeleton?
Now *that’s* horrifying. Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 