[Thanks, everyone, for entering—Keri is the winner!]

Family movies are one of the great joys of the Christmas season: It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Polar Express, A Christmas Story, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Chances are, your family watches your favorites together year after year. I’ve learned over the years that the familiarity of traditions is one of the greatest gifts we give our children.

Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas unless we watch Linus answer Charlie Brown’s question: What’s Christmas all about?

Years ago Bryan and I started another family movie tradition which keeps our kids from waking us up in the wee hours before dawn on Christmas morning. It’s a win-win for everyone and maybe it will work for you.

Each year our kids unwrap a movie (or two, or three) at bedtime on Christmas Eve. When they wake up in the morning middle of the night, they watch them before knocking on our door.

We choose movies we think they’ll love, and long ones too—one year we gave them the complete first season of the Batman TV series from the ’60s! (At 856 minutes, it’s the only Christmas morning movie gift they didn’t completely finish before waking us up.)

{We like the Blu-ray + DVD + Digital movie sets: one for the house, one for the car, and one for anywhere and always: you can’t lose or damage a digital copy and after you register it, you can access it wherever there’s wifi.}

The kids start Christmas early—they’re too excited to sleep!—and we get to snooze a little longer.

The Man Who Invented Christmas

In support of the new film The Man Who Invented Christmas, which releases in theaters on November 22, I’m running an early holiday giveaway of some favorite family films to add to your collection!

Film Synopsis:

The Man Who Invented Christmas tells the magical journey that led to the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer), Tiny Tim and other classic characters from A Christmas Carol. Directed by Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), the film shows how Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) mixed real life inspirations with his vivid imagination to conjure up unforgettable characters and a timeless tale, forever changing the holiday season into the celebration we know today.

Comment for a chance to win family favorites for your library!

This giveaway includes a DVD combo-pack of the following movies: The Sound of Music, Beauty and the Beast, and A Christmas Carol. Comment on this post for your chance to win.

What’s your family’s favorite Christmas movie or Christmas movie tradition?

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