10 Classic Christmas Movies You Can Watch Free (and Legally)

A maid puts two children to bed. As they sleep, Santa appears on the roof, climbs down the chimney, fills their stockings and vanishes. It lasts barely a minute, but George Albert Smith, working in Hove on the English south coast, shows Santa on the rooftop in a circle inset beside the sleeping children. The BFI’s Michael Brooke describes it as what is believed to be the cinema’s earliest known example of parallel action: showing two things happening at once.

Georges Méliès, the stage magician who invented much of early film trickery, turns a child’s Christmas Eve dream into a parade of painted scenes: a land of toys run by a crowned wizard, dancing dolls, angels delivering presents over snowy rooftops and bell-ringers calling the village to Mass through the snow. Its French title is Rêve de Noël. The surviving copy is soft, but the giant swinging church bell is pure Méliès.

Two years after The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter made the first film of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem for Edison. It follows the verse closely: Santa checking his list and building toys in his workshop, a sleigh sweeping across painted mountains and moonlit forests, the trip down the chimney, and Christmas morning around the tree. It is nine minutes long and a natural one to read aloud alongside.

D. W. Griffith’s Christmas melodrama begins in poverty: an unemployed father, ashamed that he cannot provide, leaves his family a farewell note and drinks himself senseless. Then an aunt’s estate comes through, and on Christmas Eve, in their new house with no chimney, the children rig a trap by the window to catch Santa. Henry B. Walthall plays the father, and the bartender who throws him out is a young Mack Sennett, soon to become the king of slapstick.

The oldest surviving American film of Dickens’s story, and the second-oldest surviving anywhere, after a British version from 1901. Marc McDermott’s Scrooge turns away the charity collectors and his nephew Fred, then meets Marley and the three spirits, rendered in shimmering double exposures. Bob Cratchit is Charles Ogle, who that same year played the monster in Edison’s Frankenstein for the same director, J. Searle Dawley. The whole story in about ten minutes.

Jean Renoir’s version of the Hans Christian Andersen story stars his wife, Catherine Hessling, as a young woman selling matches in the snow on New Year’s Eve. Ignored and freezing, she dreams her way into a shop window full of toys, where she and a young man she glimpsed earlier are pursued through toyland by a pirate who is Death himself. The intertitles are in French, but the story is so familiar it hardly matters. It is about half an hour, and sadder than everything else here.

Stan and Ollie are selling Christmas trees door to door in sunny California, and James Finlayson does not want one. What starts as a doorstep sales pitch becomes a slow, polite, utterly methodical war: he takes hedge clippers to their tree, they carve up his doorframe, and it escalates until his house and their car are in pieces. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1992, and it is regularly called their finest short. It runs nineteen minutes.

On Christmas Eve, three wealthy, lonely old engineers have their dinner guests cancel, so each throws a wallet containing ten dollars and a business card into the street to see who returns it. Two strangers do — a Texas cowboy and a schoolteacher — and the pair fall in love, to the old men’s delight. When a plane crash makes ghosts of all three, they stay on to watch over the couple. Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith and Charles Winninger play the three, and Maria Ouspenskaya is the exiled Russian countess who shares their house. A gentle, odd, unexpectedly moving film.

Fired from her paper, columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) prints a fake letter from an unemployed “John Doe” who vows to jump from City Hall on Christmas Eve in protest at the state of the world. The letter is a sensation, so the paper hires a broke ballplayer (Gary Cooper) to be John Doe, and a national movement grows up around a man who does not exist — until a powerful publisher sees what it could be used for. Frank Capra’s darkest film, and its climax plays out on that rooftop at midnight on Christmas Eve. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Story.

Jimmy Durante leads a family of out-of-work vaudeville acrobats who, just before Christmas, move into a flat attached to the house of a miser who stuffs his money into a hollow baseboard. Rupert, a dancing squirrel left behind by the flat’s last tenant, has made his nest right there, and when he clears out the cash to make room, the bills flutter down into the family’s rooms as if sent from heaven. Rupert himself is a stop-motion creation of producer George Pal, who made Destination Moon the same year. This copy is the original black and white; a colourised version called A Christmas Wish is a separate, copyrighted release.