Rarest Kind of Best

Commonsense Media is my go-to source for checking out the age appropriateness of movies, and here is their list of the most well-known holiday movies, and some not so well known.

Scrooge’s third visitor, from Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. With Illustrations by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843. First edition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My 6 1/2 yr old and I are definitely going to watch A Christmas Carol, but a different version – I’ve got the Alastair Sim version from 1951 on VHS. I think the Dickens classic is a terrific choice, not just for the Christmas theme but also as an introduction to other Dickens works, and a great period piece drama as well… nice for the young ones to see something from another time period. (Unbeknownst to my daughter, this is early training for watching the 6 vol. version of Pride and Prejudice with me some day!)

NB. Commonsense rates my 1951 version a little older (age 7), and says it’s darker than the 1938 film.

One thing I particularly like about A Christmas Carol is that it’s kind of a conceptual bridge for kids. They see so many black-and-white bad guy-good guy stories that it’s interesting to see what they think about a bad guy who is not only the main character, but becomes a sympathetic figure and eventually turns good. Very good. And the triumphant, warm ending is a great payoff for viewers of any age.

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On Dickens and school reading