About this application

This is an ongoing project to help you discover new interesting Christmas movies.

To build the database, I used many user-lists from Letterboxd.com. I made an effort to only include high-quality lists that contain actual Christmas . As a Christmas film, I count any film that fulfils any of the following criteria:

  • it is about Christmas directly (for example A Christmas Carol) or
  • it plays out entirely or mostly over the Christmasor mostly over the Christmasor mostly over the Christmas season (for example Die Hard) or
  • pivotal scenes of the film are set at Christmas (for example Little Women)

Just having a random scene with a Christmas tree or a Santa in the background is not enough. Having a Christmas release date is also not enough. And being a popular watch over the holiday season definitely does not count (good-bye Harry Potter films).

Attribution

The information displayed for each film has been taken from Letterboxd.com (text content); the film posters come directly from TMDB.

TMDB Logo

To obtain the posters, the TMDB API was used but this site is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.

I would like to thank all the folks over on Letterboxd who created Christmas movie lists. I would also like to thank the owners of the following two github repositories as well as the other contributors - their code enabled me to scrape the lists of Christmas movies to build my database: L-Dot and cjpeterson.

Thanks also to Toby on codepen who created the twinkling christmas lights on which i based my own adapted lights.

How I built the app

To build the database, I first identified many Christmas movie lists on Letterboxd. I used the scripts mentioned above to scrape those lists. I had to edit the scripts a bit too because I needed specific information moving forward, for example to get the link to TMDB. Then i wrote a number of Python scripts to enrich the data further:

  • I added more genres (no Christmas move genre list is complete without "Hallmark" or "A Christmas Carol", right?)
  • I added a movie poster link (by use of the TMDB API) And finally, I used a Python script to create all the film pages for my app.