CREDIT: FSU PUBLICATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT

Around this time of year, many of us celebrate by spending time with our families and reminiscing about holiday tales. We create wholesome memories that grow to have sentimental meaning over time. As we age and mature, we reflect on these classic holiday stories, establishing a sense of nostalgia and comfort, connecting us to our childhood and livening up the feeling of the holidays.

Every holiday tale typically has a meaning for the listeners to take away, like a life lesson. Victorian author Charles Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol is held in high regard as it teaches the lesson of being thankful during the holidays for the possessions and family you have.

Other popular stories spread similar messages about the holidays with different allegories and characters. Each new story impacts a new generation who reflect with their own personal viewpoints and emotions toward it.


Many staff from around the Fanshawe Student Union (FSU) hold sentiment with holiday stories as they tie them to memories with their families from their childhood. When the holidays come around, they reflect back to the good old days and continue to carry these traditions to this day, like Interrobang reporter Justin Koheler.

Koheler said that when he was a child, he and his family would travel up north to the Parry Sound area every Christmas to spend time with his family. Every single Christmas that he can remember, his family annually watched a particular collection of classic Christmas stories in Claymation movie format.

“I remember growing up, my family had this one DVD collection that had about four different classic Claymation animated movies. It was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman, and the Little Drummer Boy. Every single Christmas, I would bring up with us up north to see some of my family and every Christmas Eve we would end up putting all those in and running through them.”

Kohler also said that after finishing all four movies, his family would vote for which one was there favourite story, saying “Every year we kind of flip-flop which one got voted off the island, but those four in particular have a really, really near and dear place in my heart.”

Veronica Visla, a Fuel Esports content creator, said her favourite holiday story is a movie called Arthur Christmas. The movie tells the story of two brothers who are left with taking over their father Santa Claus’ workshop for Christmas one year.

“Back in fourth or fifth grade, I used to come home from school every single day during the winter season,” Visla said “I just watched Arthur Christmas all the way through and sometimes more than once just because I was like, ‘This is a great movie.’”

Visla also said that she continues to watch that movie to this day as she has been doing it for so long.

For Interrobang reporter Alex Allan, it all started back when he was a wee lad, with a Christmas catalogue that his mother brought home for him as a child.

“The first one that I remember was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Allan said.

What made it most captivating for Allan was the animation style they used for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer film, with the Claymation boggling his young adolescent mind.

“To this day, I’m 24 now and like when I was a kid, I always looked at these puppets and wondered how they created something like that. The animation behind it is still unique to me to this day.”

Allan would sit around the TV with his family and anticipate when these Christmas specials would come on the air. That led him to discovering his family’s favourite story, Shrek the Halls.

“My parents and I would watch Shrek the Halls because we are huge fans of Shrek,” Allan said. “We saw that on TV first and then we made the tradition just to keep watching it from here and there time to time just because it’s funny seeing how the Shrek family were celebrating the holidays.”

Another story that was most memorable for Allan was Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean, as he said that movie would make him fall off his chair from laughter.

“The way that he was using and playing around with the puppets had me crying out of laughter as a kid, when looking at it now, it’s like, ‘Yeah it wasn’t that funny, but it’s a memory,” Allan said.

Regardless of the medium, holiday tales have always been a part of our lives, connecting us to our pasts by letting us reflect on the nostalgia of our childhood. It’s important to carry on these traditions as we get older so that when one day we have families of our own, we can share what made the holidays so special for us with them.