And if Christmas movie trivia happens to be your thing, there are also plenty of “fun facts” to feast on with the turkey. “If the Connecticut farmhouse [in 1945’s Christmas in Connecticut] looks familiar,” Duralde notes, “it’s because the set was also used in Bringing Up Baby (1938).” And, he asks, did you know that the artfully titled Santa With Muscles (1996), starring Hulk Hogan, “was produced by Jordan Belfort, who would later become the subject of Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street?”

What the book’s format precludes is any substantial scrutiny of the mechanics of the Christmas movie as a genre (although they can be detected between the lines). Some of the films might be about Santa’s sleigh, snow, reindeer, presents and the like, but more often than not they’re about the ways in which people – families, friends, strangers – come together at Christmas. In many, it’s almost as if the festive season is the MacGuffin and what the films are really about is who the characters are, what happens between them and the so-called “spirit of Christmas”.

Also missing is any serious consideration of the cultural aspects of the book’s topic. Duralde recognises that films “can be educational” as well as entertaining, recalling how his childhood viewings of Frank Capra’s irresistible 1946 “Christmas classic”, It’s a Wonderful Life, provided him “with an early lesson about banks, home loans, and the Great Depression”.

But if he’d thought a bit more about Capra’s film – as Nora Gilbert, professor of Literary and Film Studies at the University of North Texas, did recently in The Conversation – he might have concluded that it was also, if inadvertently, giving us a preview of what America would be like 80 years on.

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Along the same lines, his entry for Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) – which features Judy Garland’s heart-rending performance of the famous Christmas song to which his title knowingly alludes – is a letdown. He includes it as one of his “classics”, expressly for its “idyllic” depiction of the Smith family and “their beloved home town”. But he overlooks the ways in which the film subtly allows us glimpses of the darkness lurking beneath its ostensibly sunny surfaces.

The limitations evident in Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas mean that it’s not exactly an indispensable inclusion in Santa’s sack this year. But if you’re looking for a guide to what films might make for appropriate viewing during the coming week or two, you could do a lot worse.

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