Finally, a Christmas movie about Christmas

Filmmaker Dallas Jenkins’s latest work, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, an adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel, reminds us of what Christmas is all about at its core.

In an era where most contemporary Christmas films focus on secular themes, the “Christmas spirit” is often presented as a stand-in for faith. While such portrayals highlight positive aspects of the season — joy, generosity, togetherness — they frequently sidestep the spiritual foundation of the Christian celebration: the birth of Christ. Christmas has become a cultural behemoth, transcending race, religion, and borders. In a fractured world, it is perhaps a boon that we can collectively share a holiday that brings joy. Yet every so often, even for the religiously ambiguous, it is worth revisiting Christmas’s origin story, not its watered-down and corporatized offshoot.

Jenkins grounds Pageant in a picturesque small-town America that’s so earnestly nostalgic it feels like it tumbled out of a Norman Rockwell painting. At its heart is Judy Greer’s Grace, a quintessential small-town mom. But Grace is no Instagram “trad wife” showing off bread baked on a La Cornue stove and Smeg appliances. She’s old-school Americana: the quiet kind of steady, middle-class decency we see so rarely outside of Jimmy Stewart movies and John Mellencamp lyrics. Her life revolves around her family, the community church, and making the annual Christmas pageant a moral and joyous triumph, not for the New York Times critics, but for her neighbors.