In Poland, we have a "bizarre TV tradition" of watching Home Alone during Christmas on one of the main TV stations (Polsat). Usually Home Alone 2 is played the next day.

One year the station wanted to play a different movie during the holiday season and people wrote petition to bring it back.

Home Alone is popular all over. It gets broadcasted in Japan, too.

In the Netherlands it wasn’t planned to be shown this year and a DJ started and completed a donation incentive to play the audio track on national radio:

https://www.npo3fm.nl/nieuws/3fm/389107-home-alone-niet-op-t...

Same thing in Portugal, for decades now. Similar to The Sound of Music.

Home Alone is a classic Christmas movie. That and Die Hard are Christmas tradition for my family.

Wait, this happens in the UK too!

We’ve done it for 50 years in Denmark, and the show doesn’t really change except for a few snippets of upcoming Disney movies at the end.

Why is this bizarre? Most countries seems to have traditions relating to seasons. In the UK It's a Wonderful Life and The Snowman are iconic and broadcast every year.

Japanese traditionally eats KFC at Christmas. I'm sure most countries have quirks like these. They are harmless, they create a sense of togetherness and humans in general likes traditions and rituals. Considering how big especially Donald Duck is in Scandinavia, it seems natural that there would be a Christmas tradition that incorporates that.

The only bizarre thing is the condescending tone of the author.

The author of the Snowman book, Raymond Briggs famously always disliked Christmas and thought the cartoon twee. His picture book includes no Santa or Christmas, just a boy who makes a snowman, which comes to life and is melting next morning.

40 years later, he's bloody sick of it.

“I was fed up with it years ago. I’m even more fed up with it now it’s been going on for nearly 40 bloody years.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/21/raymond-briggs...

Another tradition is that Jews eat Chinese food on christmas. Don’t find that bizarre at all.

Chinese restaurants (or maybe more accurately restaurants run by Chinese immigrants) used to be the only places open on Christmas. For anyone wanting to eat out, it was a defacto non-choice.

It might be seen as a tradition now, but like most traditions, the origins were practical.

As a Swede I think the main difference between "these are movies and shows that are popular around Christmas" is that it's always shown at the exact same time on the exact same channel and becomes a strict part of Christmas eve planning.

This has its roots in that non-state broadcast TV was outlawed until 1992 (satellite TV broadcast from the UK was the workaround but far from universally adopted)

The takeaway for me: “Kalle Anka is almost like gathering around the fire in old times and listening to fairy tales.”

I hope that these shared cultural experiences can occasionally pull us back together after being scattered by algorithmically generated bubbles of social media.

In America it's A Christmas Story I think. They have a TV channel dedicated to reruns of it.

Christmas Story 24 hours on TBS. Though there are plenty of other Christmas staples such as the stop motion Frosty and Rudolph films, It's a Wonderful Life, and Charlie Browns Christmas.

In Germany they watch that old British sketch about a blind old woman and her butler having dinner with guests who aren't there.

The sketch is called Dinner for One and in Germany it's watched on New Year's Eve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One

They do likewise in Norway, on the 23:rd, even though the sketch itself is about New Years eve :)

It's a birthday. Her 90 year birthday. It doesn't have any relation to New Years or Christmas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One

Drunk, not blind

Actually you are right and I am wrong, sorry

They watch it in Denmark too

Do these things really still count as "bizarre", given how many countries had them for how long?

We have the same tradition in Norway, probably stole it from our neighbours.

I'm Norwegian too, and remember watching it on a Swedish broadcasting channel when I was a kid. We had two channels, the Norwegian state funded broadcasting channel, and the Swedish state funded broadcasting channel. Good times!

I watched it on all the Nordic channels, when I was a kid. Couldn't get enough cartoon back then apparently. when it wasn't an abundant "commodity" like today.

There are several films that are probably streamed throughout the world during christmas.

One that I used to watch every year on cable TV here in Brazil when I was a child (you can guess I'm not that old) is "Jingle all the Way"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_All_the_Way

Jingle All the Way is one of my personal Christmas favorites, along with Trading Places.

Sweden has a bunch of lovely Christmas traditions. My favorite is this huge straw Christmas goat (Gavle bocken: https://www.instagram.com/gavlebocken/)

Interestingly, there is (semi-)traditional vandalism to burn the sucker down every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat#Timeline

Hopefully he survives this year!

It stands, third year in a row! Arsonists are busy burning cars.

In France, when I was younger, it was on new year’s day (Well the night between the years) and a channel always runned Tex Avery cartoons.

Every year. Don’t know why or if it’s still true (not living in France)

It sounds as weird as watching Die Hard.

People are focused on cooking dinner and/or getting ready for the Christmas parties, it's not weird that some different customs will come up at that time.

What’s further confusing is that this is broadcast on state owned TV which is required to be ad-free. Yet, this section is riddled with ads for upcoming Disney movies.

Foe many years it was the same fixed version every year. The 'previews' came after they lost the contract and had to renegotiate a new one. I presume it avoids the ad rules as the channel licenses the show rather than get paid to show it.

In Canada, there is an aviation ghost story radio show called “The Shepard” that is played each year.

Played now. Alan Maitland used to read it afresh each year. That and/or O Henry's *The Gifts of the Magi". That goes back to my childhood, and I haven't been a child for half a century. I can't remember now whether they were both done each year or alternated.

I moved overseas 15 or so years ago, and when I left I felt that this tradition was already on the way out. As far as I understand, it's been going away even more since then, but I don't have much in the way of evidence.

When I wad a kid in the 80's, they barely ever showed any Disney cartoons on TV. This meant that the Disney on christmas tradition was a big thing. These days it's available everywhere so there is really nothing to drive the tradition, any i believe that the only ones who even care about it are my age.

It's not only Donald Duck, it's a random collection on Disney clips. The only "bizarre" thing about it, is that every year seconds are cut away as the removed clips are no longer considered politically correct.

Italy has something like that too. Since 1989 one of the major TV networks broadcasts Trading Places on Christmas Eve night.

It's nowhere near as common today as it was just a couple of years ago. Nobody I know watches it anymore, but everyone used to d it. Of course, it may just be our social circle.

Christmas Eve 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792328

That's funny. Sometimes we're quite irrational. We're still primates in some aspects (I mean no offense to Swedish, we all have strange traditions in our countries)

out of curiosity, what about this strikes you as a quality specific to primates?

Did you hear the story about the primates and the stair?

https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys

is there any study or experiment that goes with this story?

It is possible that will change when Disney starts selling their subscription service in Sweden.

Disney will likely use its huge archive to sell subscriptions.

That likely is the reason Home Alone isn’t on public tv in the Netherlands, as tinus_hn says in https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21871486

If they play it hard, a lot of traditional Christmas movies will move behind a paywall. For example, Die Hard and Jingle all the Way, commented on this page, all are from 20th Century Fox, which is Disney owned, as is The Sound of Music)

...on Christmas Eve.

And this article is from 2009 for christmas's sakes.