Culturess writers on their favorite Christmas moments

From The Silence of the Lambs. Image via Orion Pictures/MGM.

Dan Selcke

Generally speaking, my family doesn’t have any unique Christmas traditions all its own. Sure, we open presents and eat lots of food, but that stuff’s standard. And I think that’s fine. Why mess with the classics?

When the lot of us get together, extended relatives and all, we also tend to put on movies. It’s a good way to fill space should conversation lag. Again, we tend to stick to the standards — Christmas Vacation is a popular option — with one exception. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, and I don’t even know exactly when, but whenever I visited my dad’s side of the family for the holidays, we often found ourselves watching The Silence of the Lambs. You know, that great Christmas movie where Anthony Hopkins eats a guy’s face and Jodie Foster finds a severed head in a derelict storage facility. That doesn’t scream holiday cheer to you?

My cousin recently had a son, so we don’t break out Silence anymore — we seem to have switched to The Nightmare Before Christmas, for his sake. But for better or worse, whenever I hear Hannibal Lecter talk about how best to interact with a census taker, it always says Christmas to me.