TBS, Check local listings
The best-known holiday marathon tradition continues all day, with Peter Billingsley still hoping to receive that BB gun for Christmas, while getting into all sorts of mischief in the meantime. This 1883 Jean Shepherd comedy inspired The Wonder Years, among many other nostalgic offshoots, and is available every two hours today until 8 p.m. ET.
Various Networks, Check local listings
Accept no substitutes! This is the “original” Yule Log,
first televised by New York’s WPIX in 1966. And it’s still available, in a multi-hour Christmas Day presentation, in many local TV markets around the country. Check the
Yule Log website for where and when to gather around the mantle in your city. Season 2. For starters: In New York, it’s on WPIX from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. ET.
Sundance, 6:00 p.m. ET
Here’s a brand-new holiday event that I hope will become an annual, expanded tradition. Sundance Channel, beginning at 6 p.m. ET, is showing 1987’s The Princess Bride four times in a row. That’s a great start – but this movie is so great itself, and such a perfect family film, it ought to be shown all day, as TBS is doing with A Christmas Story. But to begin with, a four-peat is a wonderful Christmas gift. I really, really mean it. Anybody want a peanut?
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
TCM, too, has a holiday film marathon of sorts: an all-night visit with the Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney as an amorous youngster. It begins with this 1938 movie, which boasts two very noteworthy costars as the other points in Andy’s romantic triangle. One is Judy Garland, the year before she filmed The Wizard of Oz. The other is Lana Turner, eight years before she steamed up the screen in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And Love Finds Andy Hardy isn’t on DVD, so consider it an appropriately timed TCM gift.
BBC America, 9:00 p.m. ET
This year’s annual Christmas Doctor Who special officially introduces the Doctor’s new companion: Clara Oswin, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. (She was already seen, memorably, as Oswin, a victim of the Daleks in September’s Asylum of the Daleks episode, but who knew she would reappear – or, given the fluid time lines in this series, preappear?) Also making an appearance in this holiday special is something that should both delight and spook the youngsters: snowmen with sharp teeth. Ho ho ouch!