One more addendum to our Holidays in the Movies: the Big Game! My house isn’t really sports oriented, but we know what’s going down when the deli section at our grocery store fills up with wing varieties, chips pop from every end cap, and the beer isle (also where the ginger beer is) is crushingly full of bodies and carts. This year we celebrate! The Schmidt way:

• The Replacements (2000) : there’s something about bittersweet sports movies, especially when they are based on bittersweet reality.
• Cheerleader Camp (1988) : okay, we stole this one from summer solstice, but the summer solstice has plenty of movies and what’s a Big Game without cheerleaders?
• Absurd (1981) : a killer terrorizing a community, a police man hunt, and hospital shenanigans all while a bunch of parents are partying is a pretty good way to sum up a lot of slashers. But is that party a 10pm Big Game watching party where men clad in three piece suits eat spaghetti in front of the TV? Not usually!

Over the past few years we have been cultivating holiday themed watching to get us in the right frame of mind for every holiday. We have now amassed a list complete enough to get it into a chronologically arranged table of contents post for all the holidays in the movies posts.

January 1st	Holidays in the Movies: New Year
Second new moon after December solstice	Holidays in the Movies: Lunar New Year
Second Sunday in February	Holidays in the Movies: The Big Game
February 14th	Holidays in the Movies: Valentines
Third Monday of February	Holidays in the Movies: President’s Day
Forty seven days prior to Easter	Holidays in the Movies: Mardi Gras
Mid-March and/or tied to Easter	Holidays in the Movies: Spring Break
March 17th	Holidays in the Movies: St. Patrick’s Day
April 1st	Holidays in the Movies: April fools
First Sunday after a full moon falling on or after March 21st	Holidays in Movies: Easter
April 8th	Holidays in the Movies: Rex Manning Day
April 21st	Holidays in the Movies: Antonio Bay Anniversary
14th day of Nissan at the time of the full moon	Holidays in the Movies: Passover
April 22nd	Holidays in the Movies: Earth Day
Last Friday in April (FL Arbor Day: third Friday in January)	Holidays in the Movies: Arbor Day
May 1st	Holidays in the Movies: May Day
Beginning to mid-May	Holidays in the Movies: Schools Out
Second Sunday in May	Holidays in the Movies: Mother’s Day
Last Monday of May	Holidays in the Movies: Memorial Day
Third Sunday of June	Holidays in the Movies: Father’s Day
June 20 or 21st	Holidays in the Movies: Summer Solstice
July 4th	Holidays in Movies: 4th of July
July 25th	Holidays in the Movies: Christmas in July
Late August	Holidays in the Movies: Back to School
First Monday of September	Holidays in Movies: Labor Day
October 31st (starting with the fall equinox)	The Holiday Schmidt: Halloween zine (coming soon)
Forth Thursday of November	Holidays in Movies: Thanksgiving
25th day of Kislev	Holidays in the Movies: Hanukkah
December 25th (starting on Black Friday)	The Holiday Schmidt: Christmas zine (coming soon)
December 25th	My favorite Christmas Carol

This one was hard. We’ve tried some thematic watching for other holidays that don’t have a lot of movie representation, but figuring out what to do for Father’s day stymied us for years. We have a line up for this year that I like to call: It’s So Hard For a Girl to Make Her Daddy Proud.

• Footloose (1984): Ariel has been pushing against the constraints of her father, the Reverend Moore long before Ren arrives in town and starts testing his own boundaries in the town.
• Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985): Janie breaks from her military routine to take a chance on her dreams and audition for Dance TV. Her father doesn’t accept that it will mean her running loose in a new city on her own.
• Dirty Dancing (1987): Baby finds her own summer adventure helping staff at the summer resort, and for the first time falls out of her father’s favor.

And for a little horror diversion: Hellraiser (1987) is a great father and daughter relationship movie as well.

April 8th is Rex Manning Day! Because sometimes movies create holidays of their own. This year, Rex Manning Day just happens to coincide with a solar eclipse. So why not pair a rewatch of Empire Records (1995) with The Awakening (1980).

We haven’t been completely lucky finding acceptable movies that took place on Mother’s Day, so this is another holiday where a thematic selection of movies will come to the rescue. There is a glut of mother themed movies to choose from, and so this year we might:

• Psycho (1960): What’s there to say? Essential.
• Dark Water (2002): I lean toward the Japanese original.
• My Stepmother is an Alien (1988): I haven’t seen this one since I was a kid.
• Serial Mom (1994): Also essential.

I may have mentioned before how our lives revolve around the academic year, so the end of schools is essentially our beginning of summer, even though it happens in May for us. Early May. In Florida, though, summer may have well been in place for months already, weather wise.

• The Prowler (1981): This is only the first and not the last example that graduation parties are not a good idea.
• Graduation Day (1981): we have many many movies featuring Linnea Quigley.
• House of Sorority Row (1982): I’ve seen enough movies to know not to do pranks, ever.
• Hide and Go Shriek (1988): For their graduation party, a bunch of goofballs decide to hide in a furniture store after closing and party all night. Thankfully, a deranged killer comes after them. Please note: This is not the same movie as The Initiation (1984).
• Can’t Hardly Wait (1997): we revisited this a while ago when indulging in some teen movie nostalgia and have since added it to our shelves.
• The Perfect Score (2004): ages since I’ve seen this.
• You’re in Love Charlie Brown (1967): set on the last few days of the school year; there is a Charlie Brown for every holiday!
• Dr. Giggles (1992): Beginning with the last day of school and venturing into the first days of summer break, an escaped sanitarium patient terrorizes teens and adults alike.