Friday night is movie night at our house. After the toddler goes to bed, my husband, our 8-year-old, and I settle in for the feature of the week. And lately, given the nature of the season, we’ve watched a lot of Christmas films. We kicked things off with Miracle on 34th Street (1994), followed it up with Elf, and closed out December with Home Alone. And after a while, I started to notice a pattern. In each of these films, overworked, neglectful parents learn, through the spirit of Christmas, to reprioritize family over their careers.

Which is all well and good, but why Christmas? Why, of all the times in the year, all the holidays even, should Christmas be the time to recalibrate your priorities?

It’s not just the films we watched on movie night. It’s everywhere. It’s a tried and true Christmas trope. (If you don’t believe me, watch any Hallmark Christmas movie ever.) Christmas is when big-city workaholics, obsessed with their careers and their climb up the corporate ladder, learn to slow down and fall in love. Out-of-touch, overly ambitious fathers finally bond with the children who’ve needed them desperately. Frazzled and exhausted mothers pause the daily grind and remember how to play. Christmas, these movies want us to know, is a time to remember what really matters.

There is a kind of time travel baked into Christmas — a direct conduit between who we are today and who we used to be. It has to do with the traditions we keep at Christmastime. Once, we were children exclaiming in glee at the presents ripped open under the tree. Now, we are parents, watching indulgently as our children do the same. Once, we waited long into the night, staring hopefully at a star-studded sky, looking for reindeer. Now, we stay up waiting for our children to fall asleep so we can put the presents under the tree. Once, we sat down to a Christmas meal, nestled in the glow of our family’s love. Now, we make the meal and keep the home that makes our children feel safe and loved.

These Christmas traditions offer a kind of secular symbolism for the deeper meaning of the season. Santa Claus, elves, and the North Pole speak to us, in nonreligious terms, of belief. Singing songs, playing games, throwing snowballs, and hanging Christmas wreaths give us tangible proof of the spiritual connection between one human being and another.

In these movies, because they are movies, adults come to believe in things that only children can. They participate in the magic of Christmas, not because we should all suddenly start acting like Will Ferrell’s Buddy in Elf or decide, like Dorey in Miracle on 34th Street, that Santa Claus is real after all. But because participating in these rituals opens up that conduit back in time from the parents we are now to the things we knew when we were children.

Every year, we come face to face with all the Christmases that came before. And so our lives come into focus in a way they don’t on any other day, at any other time. Suddenly, we see, like Kevin’s mother in Home Alone, that when we allow the grown-up stresses of Christmas to take priority, we lose sight of the things that really matter.

And when we get right down to it, when we stare down the years back into the eyes of the children we once were, we suddenly know what matters. And it isn’t our corporate job or our vacation plans. It’s each other. Just the way it always is, every day, all the time. We knew it then, and we know it now. We just have to remember.

Faith Moore is the author of  Christmas Karol , a novel available now on Amazon. She can be found on X @FaithKMoore or on her website,  www.FaithKMoore.com .