Home for Christmas

Rick Retro’s Realm, The Realm Report #8: We're back with a Christmas reboot.

The Realm Report #8: We’re back with a Christmas reboot.

Happy Holidays! 🎅

I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends! May the rest of your holiday season this year be blessed!

Joy to the World! ✝️

The Lord has come!

Of course, the Good News of Christmas is the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

On a Good News Scale of zero to ten (ten being that particular Christmas Good News), the return of Retro Movie Reviews with a post for the first time in over three months comes in at probably dead flat zero for most people, but hopefully more like 0.2 or so to my wonderful subscribers. 🙂

The reasons for the lack of posting are many and varied. I’ll fill you in later, but that’s not important right now. Let’s get back to the fun stuff first!

Subscriber Count 😲

Do you have any idea at how humbling it is to see my subscriber count continue to grow despite not posting for three months? It almost makes me afraid to post, because it’s when you do and offend people that they go away! 😂

We are up to 52 subscribers in our community, up eleven from the last issue of The Realm Report, in July, when it was 41. In reality that is a slower growth rate than when I was posting regularly, but I’m surprised and grateful to see any growth at all!

So What Now⁉️

For now, Project #3, Dark Whimsy Favorites will be placed on hold for the holiday season. We will return to it in 2026.

Retro Movie Reviews began in the holiday season of 2024 when I started sending reviews of Christmas movies to a group of around ten friends and family members via text. Here’s the post that kicked off my 2024 Christmas Tour:

After transitioning to Substack I have uploaded several of those original reviews, but not all of them. So it seems to me that with five times as many subscribers now, it’s a good time to shore up the Christmas section of this Substack. Roughly following the itinerary from last year (found in posts linked in the 2024 Christmas Tour post), I will either link to previously uploaded reviews or upload/post the reviews from last year that had not yet been added here.

As much as possible, I will re-watch (or re-read) the reviewed works, in order to update them to my newer review standards. But that depends on my time and abilities to do so, therefore, I make no definite promises!

If you are one of my original followers via texts, the transition to Substack has added a lot to these reviews, including still photos from the films, so there is new content to enjoy. If you are one of my Substack subscribers or a random visitor, I hope you enjoy these reviews of some of the best Christmas movies ever.

What the Dickens?!

When I decided to review the best Christmas movies, I checked 10 different lists of “Best Christmas Movies Ever”. There were a few hundred entries that showed up on at least one list. However, only one work inspired 10 of those entries. That work is the novella A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens, first published in 1843. (Bonus points if you knew the full title.)

So just like last year, in preparation for reviewing some of those films, we should revisit the original novella. Here’s my review:

This Wikipedia link has numerous options for free online reading under External Links:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol

That’s all for today. Tomorrow I will post the official project itinerary and the next day we visit the early short films based on this novella.

If you are one of those completists (a vice that I share) who is new to this Substack, you can start from the beginning with my first post to the text group and continue forward with the “Next (all sections) ➡️” links until you reach those “not-yet-uploaded-to-Substack” posts that I’m going to be adding this month. Hopefully. 😉 By starting from the beginning, you will get extra commentary between reviews, little details which I will probably not refer back to during this year’s reboot tour.

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Thanks for your support.
Keep the comments coming!

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Last updated 2025-12-01