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What’s your favorite Christmas movie?…Better yet, what’s your favorite non-conventional Christmas movie?

You know the sort, don’t you? They aren’t completely draped in red and green…they take place at Christmas backdrops but aren’t necessarily about Christmas? Perhaps they’re snarky, perhaps they’re violent, perhaps they’re thoughtful without being sentimental.

For me, the answer has taken a strange path to my door.

My favorite non-conventional Christmas movie is Billy Wilder’s THE APARTMENT, which is entirely set during the last two weeks of December. There’s an office Christmas party that sets the wheels in motion, a Christmas Eve to forget, and a glorious final line that gets spoken as the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.

The strange path is that not only is this movie somewhat new to me (I only first watched it in 2009 or so), and since then it has become one of my all-time favorites. As for the tradition of watching it close to Christmas Eve, that only began about three years ago when I was looking for something to put on after running out of every other good Christmas movie by then. Thus the question posed itself “What else could I watch?”…and a new tradition was born.

So as I put something special in my morning coffee, and slowly start getting the home ready for friends and family, grab those headphones and listen back to an old episode of The Matineecast where my dear friend Jess Rogers and I talk about the in’s and out’s of my favorite non-traditional Christmas movies THE APARTMENT.