Last month, friend and colleague Cecelia Kusturin published “Why A Nightmare Before Christmas is for Halloween, Not Christmas”. It’s an excellent piece that is worth checking out, but I take issue with the thesis. Whether Henry Selick’s stop-motion classic adaptation of Tim Burton’s iconic poem belongs in the “Halloween” or “Christmas” category is a question wrongly asked. Nightmare is a Thanksgiving movie.
Yes, you read that right. Admittedly, this arises from a personal place. When my cousins and I got together for Thanksgiving growing up, this was always one of the movies that we’d watch together along with the parade and the various Shreks. Perhaps this came from the adults in our lives thinking, “Oh crap, we need something to entertain the kids for 80 minutes, what’s around?” But the more I think about it in my technically-adult life, the aesthetics, themes, and politics of Nightmare are better suited to Thanksgiving than any other holiday.
Let’s start with the plot of Nightmare Before Christmas. We are introduced to the creepy, kooky Halloween Land, populated by macabre creatures and spectres, as they celebrate their favorite holiday. After a successful celebration, protagonist Jack Skellington breaks away from the ghouls and sings about his spiritual crisis: after a lifetime of celebrating Halloween, he has lost his spark for the season and dreads spending another year planning more of the same. Thus, right off the bat Nightmare takes place after Halloween has already happened, and our main character is eager to move away from it. The horror-inspired visuals of the opening number disappear and don’t return until the action-packed climax. The overtly spooky elements give way to neutral, somewhat dull depictions of a community in autumn, which emphasizes Jack’s rut and his enchantment with the new and exciting possibilities of Christmas Town.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong. Jack not only wrecks Christmas Town for its native people (more on that later), he unleashes chaos in Halloween Town as well courtesy of his dealings with Oogie Boogie. Jack wants something new, but needs to realize how much he loves what he already has. Gratitude and renewing your connections to loved ones are Thanksgiving’s most important themes. If we are judging by themes instead of pure plot, Nightmare has more to say about thankfulness than any of Halloween or Christmas’s most prominent emotional cores, i.e. courage over fear or peace on earth.
Jack’s adventure also inadvertently depicts the problem of cultural appropriation that underlies Thanksgiving in America. Jack is on a quest for spiritual fulfillment (a pilgrim, if you will) that takes him to a literal New World. Upon arriving, he sees the aesthetics and gets a vague picture of the culture, decides he likes it, and instead of having honest conversations with the native people, he decides to take it for himself. It’s far from a perfect comparison, but Native Americans face a similar conundrum with Christmas-Towners when celebrating Thanksgiving, a sincere celebration of noble virtues that they know is built on a shallow understanding and outright lies about their history and culture. Thus, Jack demonstrates the ugliness of Thanksgiving’s history, and the story ends on an optimistic note where the Christmas Town leadership is saved and things are set right. In real life, we still have work to do if we are going to arrive at this point.
As the midway point between Halloween and Christmas, Nightmare is an ideal movie because it’s a little bit of both. So this November, between the parade, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Turkey Hollow, Charlie Brown, She’s Gotta Have It, Knives Out, and American Experience: The Pilgrims, make room for this holiday classic.