Holding Over Into 2025

Happy New Year! 🎉 I figured I needed to start this year off right, especially given the false start of a few months ago. And so, at long last, here’s an email from yours truly, Zach Hoag, via this newsletter, Write Into the Deep.

If you spent anytime online this holiday season, you might have noticed that there’s no lack of chatter in the discourse regarding what, precisely, constitutes a Christmas movie. It started years ago with bold assertions about Die Hard and Gremlins (we were all like 😱, such naive little Internet dwellers), but now all manner of slightly-Christmas-adjacent films have their, ahem, diehard supporters.

You’ve seen the posts: “Mean Girls is a Christmas movie!” “You’ve Got Mail is a Christmas movie and you can’t convince me otherwise.” “Friday After Next IS a Christmas movie and we CAN tussle about it.” “The Godfather is a Christmas movie too.” “If the standard for a film being ‘a Christmas movie’ is merely that it takes place at Christmas time, then Jurassic World is a Christmas movie.” (All of these are recent posts I’ve seen on Threads.)

[Do you have any nontraditional Christmas movies you’d throw hands to defend as holiday classics? Reply or comment to let me know.]

As for me and my house, we will defend Little Women (Gerwig) as a Christmas movie to the very death. There are at least two Christmases in it, and the whole thing just feels perfectly created for Christmastime. Plus, Timothée Chalamet awkwardly ice skates in an outfit that looks like a 19th century designer riff on a Nutcracker uniform, which settles the debate in my opinion.

Truthfully, that’s what the discourse feels more “about” at this point: Is it a movie that just feels right to watch at Christmastime, even if it is not centered entirely on the Christmas holiday or typical Christmas themes (Santa, presents, elves, etc.)? Does it capture something about the essence of the season and the complex, cathartic feelings it evokes without hitting you over the head with a glass ornament?

At least, that’s how I approach the matter. And for me, no film in recent memory answers this criteria with a resounding “YES” more perfectly than The Holdovers.

The Liminal Space

This movie is not only perfect for Christmastime more generally — it’s perfect for that strange, surreal, liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s that we just call “Christmas Week” around here. I’ve watched The Holdovers for two years running during that week and it never ceases to speak deeply to where I am at that time.

But liminal spaces — spaces between — don’t just occupy a week here or a month there. Sometimes the liminal space opens for a year, or years even: these gaping chasms of time where things seem to both stand still and rapidly, irrevocably change. Collectively, we all experienced something like this during “the pandemic” year, where the pause to our normal rhythms of existence masked seismic changes taking place beneath the surface. But my guess is that you’ve experienced times between the times in your life that are deeply unique and personal to you as well.

The past year was once such time for me, and my Christmas Week experience was kind of like a microcosm of that year. It was a chance to catch my breath from the radically transitional and frustratingly stagnant 2024. It was a chance to recover, somewhat at least, from the death of what I thought things were shaping up to be after a long-awaited out of state move; and a chance to consider, somewhat at least, what things might actually be instead, in the season ahead.

Holding Over

The new year is here, but to be honest, I’m still holding over. The liminal space continues, at least for a bit longer.

** Spoilers Ahead **

In the film (please watch it immediately if you haven’t yet), troubled prep school student Angus Tully is held over at school during the holiday break because his mother has other plans. That crushes him and signals a central wound in his life: the neglect from his wealthy mom, alongside the recent loss (to mental illness and institutionalization) of his beloved dad.

In their place he inherits a surrogate parent to guide him through the liminal space, but one he thinks he hates: his Ancient Civilizations teacher Mr. Hunham (a lazy-eyed Paul Giamatti at his most brilliant). We think that’s the long and short of it, a story about an unlikely surrogate family that forms around Tully — which includes the grieving cafeteria manager, Mary, in an award-winning performance from the sublime Da’Vine Joy Randolph. And it is that story. It is that story at its most beautiful and profound.

But it is more than that, because as it turns out, both Tully and Hunham are in their liminal spaces at the same time (as is Mary, in a moving side-story). And Tully becomes the catalyst for Hunham to finally transition from one long season of his life into another.

[Are you in a season of holding over right now? Or have you experienced a liminal space like that in the past? Reply or comment if you want to share.]

In this year’s watch of the movie, what I found most powerful was the way that Hunham had built his life around a shameful secret — that he never finished his Harvard degree, and was unjustly forced out of the program amid scandal by people richer and more powerful than him. He was then given a teaching job at the boarding school he attended as a student, as an act of mercy; and, with his secret protected by his position, he never looked back.

This secret defined him; it isolated him; it limited him. He accepted that isolation and limitation as his lot in life, but in actuality, it was killing him and driving him into alcoholism and despair. What it took to enact change was the liminal space, the holdover — and a resulting scandal that he willingly created in order to save young Tully.

For Angus Tully, the decisive act from his surrogate “father” meant a potential future beyond his self-sabotaging patterns, and real success in his life.

For Mr. Hunham, it meant the absolute end of his teaching career and the identity he had so fiercely protected up to that point. Everything ahead of him would become uncertain — but simultaneously ringing with the hope of authenticity, creativity, passion, and flourishing.

When the two finally part ways after the holdover, the conversation is a gloriously succinct punch in the heart:

Hunham: "Keep your head up, alright? You can do this."

Tully: "Yeah, I was gonna tell you the same thing."

(God, this film is frigging perfect, please watch it!)

Decision & Identity

I don’t have one word for the new year — I have two. Decision and Identity.

This newsletter is still rough and new and undefined, but I am deciding to keep writing it. I’ve got some other decisions to make this year as well.

And these will be in line with my deeper identity, one that has felt oft-ignored and even suppressed in the previous season of my life, however necessary it all might have been. The season before this liminal space began. Which is just before the season ahead.

Perhaps you’re sensing something similar. But regardless of the space you find yourself in, liminal or otherwise, thanks so much for reading.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and Christmas Week full of traditional and nontraditional Christmas movies. Happy New Year to you and yours.