Favorite Christmas Movies After Hours

Nothing says Christmas like a water buffalo. For a poor family in Asia, getting a water buffalo is like getting a farm tractor to pull a plow, or getting a milk truck full of delicious milk, or getting a stand at the market to sell cheese. A water buffalo opens the door for work, food, and income. More importantly, it opens the door to talk about Jesus.

And nothing says Christmas better than that. This is Chris Hughes with the Christian Perspective Podcast with Chris Hughes, where we encourage our listeners to engage the culture with Jesus Christ. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds, so enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. Masculine Journey After Hours, a time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here, now.

Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. We are talking about Christmas today. Can you imagine why we're talking about Christmas? Rodney, do you have any idea why? I am clueless.

You're clueless? Can you help me? It's Christmas. It's Christmas. So we have to talk about Christmas at Christmas. I better open my presents.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that. And so our presents today is going through and talking about our favorite movie clips, or it may not be our favorite movie clips, but movie clips are important to us at Christmas. They bring back a lot of memories. Yeah, and so we want to go ahead and get Harold in here, because we didn't get him into the last show. So Harold, why don't you talk a little bit about your clip, and we'll go ahead and play it. Well, my clip is from The Christmas Vacation, which is a movie that my family has been watching every year for longer than I care to remember. And my family thinks that I have certain characteristics that are similar to Clark Griswold.

In fact, Brad will quite often call me Clark. But this scene is where they're going after their Christmas tree, and they're trudging through snow that's over knee deep to get the tree. And one of the reasons I love this is because I did something similar back in Columbus, Mississippi. We didn't have snow, but we were living out kind of in the woods. My boys were young, and I gave them the same kind of speech he did about the cheap trees and plastic trees, etc. So we trudged way out through the woods, and I found it. And I cut it down, and I had to drag it, and it came through mud and mud puddles and water, and it weighed a ton. I was exhausted, had to wash the tree down, and when I put it up, it bent over because it was way too tall for our room.

So I totally identify with this. The Griswold family Christmas tree. Isn't it a little big? It's not big.

It's just full. Dad, that thing wouldn't fit in our yard. It's not going in our yard, Russ.

It's going in our living room. Look at it. It really is beautiful, Jack. Something else, huh, Russ?

Yeah, Dad. Isn't it beaut, Audrey? She'll see it later, honey.

Her eyes are frozen. Most enduring traditions of the season are best enjoyed in the warm embrace of kith and kin. The tree is a symbol of the spirit of the Griswold family Christmas. Dad, did you bring a saw? Clark, do you think there's enough room for the angel? Oh, sure, honey. I have a little more trimming to do, but that won't be a problem. Ready? I give you the Griswold family Christmas tree. Looks great. Little full.

Lot of sap. So, Harold, other than your adventure, you're sitting over there laughing. I know you've heard this a few dozen times by now. Yeah, but it always tickles me. I just love it. Clark is just, he always overdoes things, and they backfire on him. He has the best intentions, right?

I mean, he wants to make the best thing for his family. Absolutely. Well, I want to go ahead, and Andy, I need you to kind of get up to one of the microphones, because this is a clip that's not yours, but you wanted to play it for someone else, so I want to give you the credit for it.

We're concerned about men's hearts on this show, right? So, Danny submitted this about two or three weeks ago when we were talking about what does restoration feel like, and it comes from a Christmas movie, and we kind of skipped him over last week, too, on what do you want for Christmas, but it's perfect. You know, it's perfect for the Christmas story.

It's when Scrooge gets his heart back and kind of figures out what the priorities in life should be about, so. Yeah, and we realized if we don't play it this week, he's got to wait 12 months. Yeah, exactly.

I want to make sure he came back to the show and, you know. Yeah. Well, we'll go ahead and play it. Nine o'clock. In daylight. What day? Hello, you there, boy! Me, sir?

Yes, you, my good. What day is today? Today? Why, it's Christmas Day, of course. Christmas Day. I haven't missed it. The spirits did it all in one night.

Well, they can do anything they like. Hello, me fine fellow! Hello! Do you know the poulterers in the next street but one? I should hope I did. Intelligent boy, remarkable boy. Do you know if they've sold the turkey that was hanging there? What, the one as big as me? Delightful boy.

Yeah, the one as big as you. It's hanging there now. Well, go and buy it. Go ahead and bring them round so that I may tell them where to deliver it. Come back with the man, I'll give you shilling. In less than five minutes, I'll give you half a crown. I must dress myself.

So much to do, I don't want to lose any time. I'm as light as a feather. I'm as an angel. I'm as many as a schoolboy. I'm as giddy as a drunken man.

Christmas to everybody and a Happy New Year to the world! Apparently they didn't have any throat lodge in stores back in old England. He won Academy Awards. He did. It was a phenomenal performance. But anyway, the really cool thing about that, you know, we get the idea of the Little Dickens from there. Charles Dickens, literally, if you think about somebody who could tell a story that would change the world. That story changes the way we celebrate Christmas to this day. And it certainly had a lot to do with a lot of the movements that took kids out of slave labor and all the stuff that Charles Dickens wrote about through Oliver and Oliver Twist. And this shows the impact that one man who loves people well and talked about this.

And this is how restoration felt like. And, you know, for many, many, many, especially for me, those who know that I wrote A Christmas Corolla, which I completely plagiarized Little Dickens in order to create that. Which if you list a Christian car guy today, you got to hear that. Because it really has lines in it that come after anyone's heart. That was the idea of getting his identity back of who he really was. And, you know, that's what happened. And it is a story that's been done over and over and over again.

You know, you talked about plagiarizing it, but, you know, it's been done Magoo. It was in the lead role there. You had the Muppets. You had Captain Picard, whatever his name is. Yeah, whatever his name is.

What is it? Oh, I don't know. Captain Picard. Who is it?

I don't know. You know who Captain Picard is? You watch Star Trek, right? Sorry.

You can't think of his name? Wrong Star Trek. Oh, wrong Star Trek. I'm sorry. All right. Well, we'll keep moving. It's been done many, many times, and so it is a story that lasts. And so we're going to move on to another story called A Christmas Story. Yeah, we talk about stories that can change the world, right?

Yeah, exactly. For me, it's not Christmas until you watch The Christmas Story. And for us and our family, you can't watch The Christmas Story except for on Christmas Day, right? Because that's when they played it when I was a kid, and they played it for 24 hours straight all day long on TBS. So, this clip here is, surely everybody's seen the video, but this clip here is when the hounds, the next door neighbor's dogs come through and sneak past the old man, which he was lovingly referred to by Ralphie as the young man, snuck past the old man and ravaged the turkey and got a nice little reaction. We do apologize for the language, that's why this is in the after hours.

I did get demoted today, so yeah, I'll play on. Oh my God! You bastard! I love that tree! Papa's trees! Oh my God! The heavenly aroma still hung heavy in the house, but it was gone!

All gone! No turkey! No turkey sandwiches! No turkey salad! No turkey gravy! Turkey hash! No turkey ala king or gallons of turkey soup! Gone! All gone!

Alright, everybody upstairs, get dressed. We are going out to eat. Yeah, there you go. Alright, the whole movie they're playing up this idea of this amazing turkey and then it gets ravaged by the dogs, but one of the greatest things about that was how after that they kind of came together, went out to eat Chinese, and you can kind of picture that becoming the yearly ritual now from here on forward. It's no longer about the turkey, it's about us coming together as a family somewhere different and just brings a lot of the feels back, right? It does, and when you watch the movie and they go to the restaurant, they all come together, right?

In the middle of all that strife they think everything's ruined, but what ends up happening is they have a lot of joy and they have a lot of fun and like you said it probably becomes a family tradition. Yeah, absolutely. Kind of like this, right? It does.

It does. Andy, we have a clip of yours that we need you to set up, it has to do with about a reindeer I guess. I'll just say reindeer. Is that not yours? That's Rodney's.

So Rodney's, we'll have you set up. Oh, you're going that way? Okay. Going that way, yeah.

I'm sorry, I thought it was his. Well, he has like 20 of them in there, it's easy to do that. Yeah, I had a couple more so I can't say anything about that.

Yeah. So, for me, a lot of, when we look this up, like Robby said in the original show that my number one was Charlie Brown, but I was the last one to add clips, so I'm like, oh, what else do I have? And what always comes back for me in my memory, in my childhood, is all the really cheesy cartoonish ones that were out early. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's one of them, Frosty the Snowman, I had a clip with the Heat-Mizer and the Cult-Mizer with the... The Year Without Santa? Yeah, Year Without Santa, and all those, they're really, I don't know, if you look at them today, you're like, oh man, they're really cheesy.

But I enjoyed them as a kid, just loved them. And every year, they would come on, like clockwork, go through that week of Christmas and be able to watch them all. And that's where this one here, it also spoke to me specifically because it's like, man, poor Rudolph. I mean, we all talk about how he overcame his father wound, but this is a picture of him getting his father wound when he's born, and boy, I'd have to live and come back from that. That's why he ran off in his childhood and had to come back and everything else. Just a big story. Well, we'll simply have to... Well, now, let me tell you about Rudolph.

It all started a couple of years before the big snow. It was springtime, and Santa's lead reindeer, Donner, had just become a proud papa. Now, we'll call him Rudolph. Rudolph is a lovely name. Rudolph. Hey, he knows his name already.

Papa, mama. He's got a shiny nose. Shiny? I'd even say it glows. Well, we'll simply have to overlook it.

Now, how can you overlook that? His beak blinks like a blinking beacon. Well, Donner, where's the new member of the family?

After all, if he's going to be on my team someday, he'd better get to know me. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Well, hi there.

Aren't you the sturdy little fellow? Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Santa?

Ho, ho, and smart, too. Great bouncing iceberg. Now, I'm sure it'll stop as soon as he grows up, Santa. Well, let's hope so if he wants to make the sleigh team someday.

You see, little fellow, every year I shine up my jingle bells for eight lucky reindeer. Wow. Wow.

Exactly. No, I remember watching that as a kid. I looked forward to it.

I know. It was on CBS most of the time, and I couldn't wait. Yeah, there was just so many of those that just aren't around anymore, and that's what I grew up with, and it was just something that brings back those memories of childhood like we were talking about before, where you just want to relive some moments, and we talked about we have to really try not to put into Christmas things that were and that you can't have anymore, but look forward to the things that you do have. And Stu, he brings that movie up every year during one of our Christmas events or another. He'll always talk that the truth in that work is the land of misfit toys, right? And so it happens to Rudolph, based on his father wound, that we can all see he just got his dad thinks he's got a blinkin' beacon, is he does what we all do because we think we got a blinkin' beacon. We isolate, right? You know, we're ashamed. And so he goes off to the land of misfit toys, which clearly everybody at the land of misfit toys has got a blinkin' beacon, and in our own way, I mean, it's really a very beautiful story of Rudolph coming into his true identity, what he thought was his biggest drawback turned out to be his glory, literally.

Absolutely. Robby, I think you enjoyed saying blinkin' beakin' a little too much. Yeah, you were pretty animated about that. And then there's Burl Ives, you know.

I was gonna throw that out there. Burl Ives, you know, for me personally, my father worked for Buick and it brings back great memories for me because he came home with the very first, what was a four-track tape. It was the pre-runner to the eight-track tape. And you know, here was a car radio and they stuck this tape thing in it and we could listen to a tape in a car. It was like miraculous. Well, the only tape that was available anywhere was Burl Ives singing Mama's Got No Beans, No Rice, No Bumble Gum Oil or something.

That was the craziest song you ever heard, but Burl Ives still has a good place in my heart. Just sayin'. I think he was in both Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph. He was?

Yeah. Yeah, he had a dual role there, so. Very versatile in his cartoon acting, to say it.

And he looks like the snowman. Yeah, and then as we know, Buddy the Elf, you know, the elf was formed after that idea of cheesy, right? The people that developed the movie Elf wanted to get that look that they had from that, and Elf was, in his own way, a misfit toy, right? Yeah, I was telling these guys off the air, if you have Netflix, a great series to go watch, especially at Christmas time, is the movies that made us. And there's some of the movies I didn't really care to watch the episode on, but they had one on Elf and they have one on Home Alone. And they're both very good to go back behind the scenes and realize that, you know, both those shows hardly ever had any chance of getting made, and they were made, and they were very popular, right?

Home Alone was made on such a small budget, you know, to go back and see the whole story. And both of them became huge classics, not unlike It's a Wonderful Life, which it turned out, you know, for Frank Capa. The movie flopped at the box office, but now it's considered the best movie of all time. So what you think may have been in its day was a great big hit. Nobody came out to see it. Yeah, I actually had a college class on that movie.

Really? Yeah, we did several movies, but we spent about three weeks on It's a Wonderful Life. Going through that, doing a deep dive on it, it was a movie appreciation class, and learned a lot about Frank Capa and a lot of stuff that he had done. And you're exactly right, it was a flop, it was considered not a success in its time. But over the years, it's really kind of came on it, and surprisingly, we didn't have a clip from it. We could have. We could have.

Yeah, we could have. Well, I want to go back to my Hallmark movie, Wayne, while you're sitting there, and play a clip, and then maybe we can get one of Rodney's other ones in potentially. But it's from the movie Love Actually, and I want to play another scene from it, because we talked about it in the other show, that it's about love. And in this particular thing, you have a stepfather who has custody of his stepson, because his wife and the boy's mom died just recently, within a few weeks of this. So the young boy's struggling a lot, and the stepfather's sitting with him on a park bench trying to figure out what's going on with him. He thinks it's just depression over losing his mom, that type of thing. But kind of see where the story goes, and then it'll fast forward to another segment of him and the boy talking in their home. Harold, can you pass me the tissue box, please?

Yeah, we'll get it for you. Is this mom, or is it something else? Maybe school? Are you being bullied? Or is it something worse? Can you give me any clues, you know? You really want to know? Even though you won't be able to do anything to help?

Even if that's the case, yeah. OK. Well, truth is, actually, I'm in love. Sorry? I know I should be thinking about my mom all the time, and I am. But the truth is, I'm in love.

And it was before she died. There's nothing I can do about it. Aren't you a bit young to be in love? No. Oh, OK. I mean, I got my litter relieved. Why? Because I thought it would be something worse. Worse than the total agony of being in love?

No, you're right. Yeah, total agony. Hey, Summer.

Can't sleep? I got some terrible news today. Let's have it. Joanna's going back to America. Your girl's American? Yeah, she's American. She's not my girl. And she's going back to America. That's the end of my life as I know it. That is bad news.

Well, we need Kate, and we need Leo, and we need them now. Come on. OK, so I get it. What I like about this movie, and the father does really well, is he loves his son through this, right? You know, where he almost blows it. You hear that at that part where he says, aren't you too young for it? And this little 8-year-old, 9-year-old boy is like, no, no, not at all.

And then he captures himself, and he enters in. And what I really liked about the second part of that clip was, you're talking about the movie Titanic, Kate and Leo. You know, we need to go watch it. Obviously, the son likes the movie.

I'm assuming he'd probably watch it with his mom, whatever. But the dad knows that, and he knows that's what the kid's heart needs, right? And I think that's where it's kind of cool that you get to see a father just loving his son well through a very difficult time, and through a very time where he feels exposed, you know, falling for his first girl that he's in love with. And so it's, again, it's a movie I like quite a bit, but that was a scene from that, and it teaches you that, you know, just listening and being a part of somebody's life can be enough, right?

It doesn't have to be more than, it doesn't have to be a big present. It's sitting down talking to them, listening to them, helping them work through some things, right? That girl's name beat Patricia Bucklew? Patricia Bucklew played the lead role, you're right.

No, she didn't. So, Rodney, we have to play your other clip because you teed it up. You already talked about The Year Without Sand, and it's Robby's favorite clip, so I wanted to get it in. He was sitting over here saying, we're not going to get it, we're not going to get it, and I'm like, hold on, we'll get it. Well, he wants to hear the song, so let's play it. He does.

All right. Here he comes now, the big hand. I'm Mr. White Christmas, I'm Mr. Snow. I'm Mr. Icicle, I'm Mr. Tenmallow. Oh, friends call me Snow Miser.

Whatever I touch turns to snow in my clutch. I'm too much. We're too now. You heard the man.

We've got to see Eat Miser. I was afraid you'd say that. Oh, listen. I'm Mr. Green Christmas, I'm Mr. Sun. I'm Mr. Heaps Blister, I'm Mr. Hundred and One. They call me Heaps Miser.

Whatever I touch starts to melt in my clutch. I'm too much. Well, that's way too much, isn't it? It's a lot.

It's a lot. It's not Cindy Lou Who long, but it's long. Oh, I cut it out because I was like, the one I thought I was really going to tick off was Sam. I thought, oh, Sam's going to hate this.

But Sam's into it and Bobby's the one over there going, oh, my God. I found it always creepy watching it as a kid. They were just kind of creepy. But Rankin and Bass, I think, made all those particular type of shows back then. It was the production company.

I just remember it popping up and showing it. But we are going to do a survey. So if you go to Masculine Journey on Facebook, we'd love to hear from you on whether you like Cindy Lou Who better or you like to Heatmiser and Snowmiser better.

We'd love to hear back and know exactly which one you like more. Robby, you got anything you want to add to that? You want to plead your case for Cindy Lou Who? I mean, I don't think I have to.

It's just no. The green thing, it's particularly Scoopy. Scoopy. Scoopy.

Snoopy, Scoopy, Scoopy. Still time for our shortest clip. Happy birthday. That's right. That's right. You know, I'd love to post a picture we all got this week, but I don't know that I could.

But our friend Danny wearing a Frosty the Snowman hat. Did you guys see that? I did. Yeah, we did. And you even said, is it your birthday?

No, I didn't. Andy did. It was Andy? Andy was overthinking that way too hard. I don't know if that would be an appropriate picture to post. Frosty looked like he was up to some scrupulous action.

Yeah, we may not. But we do miss Danny. He had a great holiday and a good time. He had his anniversary this last week, so I hope they had a great anniversary.

Oh, and he had a new birth today, right? Seven corgis? Was it seven or eight? Eight corgis. Eight corgis. I think they named the last one Ocho.

They had to. Or Alcho. Yeah, yeah, one of the lads. Something like that. But go to masculinejourney.org. Send us a message. You can reach out to us. Our emails are all of our first name at masculinejourney.org.

It's that easy. You can reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. If you have a show topic that you'd like to talk about, as my voice cracks, please let us know that. Any clips that come to mind, any great movies that you've seen, anything you'd like to ask us. But the most important thing, register for the upcoming boot camp coming up March 31st through April 3rd. We'll talk to you next week.