My dad loves fantasy movies.

He loves them so much that it doesn’t matter how bad they are, how low-rent the production is, how terrible the cast is or how pitifully stupid they end up being. If there’s a dragon or some magic involved, he’s in. No questions asked.

My wife is the same way with movies about Christmas. And there are a LOT of them.

The best “traditional” Christmas movie of all time is probably either Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life. My favorite non-traditional Christmas movie is probably Bad Santa. The best movie that takes place around Christmas but isn’t really about Christmas is Die Hard. The worst Christmas movies are the ones about single career women who don’t have time for Christmas/can’t find love at Christmas/are secretly related to Santa Claus, etc.

Once December comes around, Netflix loads them up and my wife watches them all (except maybe Die Hard.) I sit next to her and drink.

I don’t mind Christmas movies. I don’t mind any genre of movie, provided I’m able to watch them in moderation. It’s when you’re not allowed to watch anything but one particular genre that things get problematic.

By the time Christmas Day comes around, I’m Christmas movied out of my mind.

We’ve watched the one with the girl from “Angel”, about a spoiled rich Manhattanite (filmed in Canada, obviously) whose parents cut her off, so she uses a little girl’s letter to Santa to land a man. We’ve watched the one with Jonathan Taylor Thomas. We’ve watched Love Actually. We’ve watched The Santa Clause movies. We’ve watched Christmas with the Kranks these movies star Tim Allen ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW?!

We watched A Nightmare Before Christmas in October because it’s NOT A CHRISTMAS MOVIE. We even gave A Very Murray Christmas a try but I honestly had NO IDEA what was even happening in that thing.

Obviously, having a child, we’ve watched all the holiday specials too. The original “Frosty” and “The Legend of Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph” and the original “The Grinch” and Jim Carrey’s Grinch (which my wife inexplicably loves) and “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” and something called “Mickey’s Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse” and countless others.

Every year, Dad tries to slide some edgier fare in, like the aforementioned Die Hard, or The Ref, or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or Lethal Weapon or The Last Boy Scout or anything else by Shane Black since all of his hilarious action movies take place during the Christmas season because he’s twisted and I respect that. And every year Mom and Buried shoots me down.

Instead, I’ve seen The 12 Dates of Christmas five times over the past two years. It stars Zack Morris. I’ve seen it five times. And now that it’s on Netflix, along with the other twelve-hundred movies of Christmas, that number is only going to climb. I thought we were friends, Netflix!

This nonstop glut of Christmas movies is almost enough to make a guy hate the holidays. And then we watch Bad Santa and all is forgiven. I could watch that Billy Bob Thornton yell at that ridiculous little chubby kid all year long!

As part of the Netflix Stream Team, I was compensated with a year’s subscription to Netflix for a year and a Roku TV. But my opinions are 100% my own.

Except for the ones Mom and Buried provides for me.