Forget home for the holidays: the best Christmas movies challenge our traditional ideas of the holiday and remind us what the birth of Christ really means in our lives.

IN CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS, WHICH JUMP-STARTED the holiday movie season this year, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen play a couple of empty nesters trying to opt out of the clutter and expense of Christmas by skipping town on a cruise. Based on John Grisham's bestseller Skipping Christmas (Doubleday), this Chris Columbus movie fits snugly in the comic genre of holiday films he and John Hughes have been making since the '80s.

Like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Home Alone I & II, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Allen's The Santa Clause I & II, the tale of the Kranks (a Christmas name ranking right up there with Scrooge and the Grinch) mixes irony and sentiment in a loving poke at our sacred or saccharine notion of "home for the holidays."

The tone of these Christmas comedies is decidedly irreverent, taking plenty of jabs at the romantic notions of home and family found in traditional Christmas classics of the '40s and '50s. Back when Bing Crosby, Loretta Young, and Natalie Wood were starring in holiday films like White Christmas, The Bishop's Wife, and Miracle on 34th Street, families didn't fly off to Paris without counting their kids, divorced dads didn't accidentally kill Santa, and nobody had any relatives or neighbors like the Griswolds. The families and holiday gatherings in these "new" Christmas classics are hilariously dysfunctional, and when Perry Como of Bing Crosby croons in the background it's for ironic effect. No one would really dream of being home with this crew.

Still, even in these satires of home and hearth the closing scenes inevitably offer up four-hanky sentimentality. These are wacky, witless folks, but when Mom--yet again--comes around the corner to find lost sheep Macauley Culkin on Christmas morn, there's not a dry eye in the house. So, too, in Grisham's tale, even the loony Kranks end up in a teary-eyed reunion that Loretta Young would have envied. The Columbus/Hughes films may poke fun at the sentiments of earlier Christmas films, but in the end they succumb to the same maudlin praise of house and home.

This is curious, because the best Christmas films, like the gospel itself, call us beyond our families and raise critical questions. Instead of celebrating the family and home, the most important Christmas movies ever made undermine the notion that the family of home is a sanctuary from the world, or that the spirit of Christmas calls us to retreat "far from the madding crowd" into the temple of our homes.

CHARLES DICKENS' A CHRISTMAS CAROL MUST BE THE granddaddy of all Christmas films. Since 1908 more than three dozen movies have been made of this story, the best of which was probably the 1951 version of Scrooge with Alastair Sim. Dickens' story also inspired countless Christmas Carol clones, from Bill Murray's Scrooged to both versions of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Unlike contemporary Christmas comedies, A Christmas Carol is a religious parable about the conversion of a rich man who repents of his greed and injustice and recognizes his duties to the poor. Like the rich man in Jesus' parable about the beggar Lazarus (Luke 16), Ebenezer Scrooge is callously indifferent to the poor just outside his home--arguing that prisons and poor houses are enough to meet their needs--and it is his failure to see the ties binding him to beggars and urchins that condemns him.

And like the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19), the repentant Scrooge promises to share his bounty with those in need (like Tiny Tim) and to make amends to those he has defrauded (like Bob Cratchit). The spirit of Christmas has not made Scrooge a better family man, it has made him a better neighbor.

For Dickens, writing about the gross economic injustices of the early industrial revolution and laissez faire capitalism of 19th-century Britain, the sin of Scrooge was his failure to respond to the desperate needs of the working-class poor crowded into the urban hovels and his indifference to the widows and orphans struggling to survive crushing poverty. The spirit of Christmas introduces Scrooge to the want and ignorance fathered by his greed and apathy, and makes him see what he is doing to his employees and their children.

FRANK CAPRA'S CHRISTMAS CLASSIC is also a parable about greed and a call for generosity, not merely to those in our own household but especially to the stranger in need. In It's a Wonderful Life George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has rejected the path Scrooge chose. George has given his life selflessly for others, has stood up to the town's wealthy miser, Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), and helped to put a roof over the heads of the working-class poor in Bed ford Falls.

And though watching Capra's film has now become a Christmas ritual for millions of American families, George Bailey was not himself a man who put family first. He and his (college-educated) wife, Mary (Donna Reed), embraced a life of stark simplicity and near-poverty so that they could help the poor. They gave up their honeymoon, lived in a wreck of a house, turned down other jobs, and gave their own children second-hand clothes because they wanted to be good neighbors.

Like other holiday films, A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life also end with sentimental scenes, and it is the rare stoic who does not weep shamelessly when ZuZu's petals show up or Clarence gets his wings. But the "family" Scrooge sends the prize Christmas goose to is that of his employee, Bob Cratchit, and the household that comes to toast and rescue George Bailey is the whole village of Bedford Falls. In both tales, the "home" we are being called to celebrate at Christmas includes our poor and struggling neighbors.

Three years before Dickens penned A Christmas Carol Alexis de Tocqueville first coined the word "individualism" to describe Americans' habit of retreating into hearth and home. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville warned about this tendency to "isolate [ourselves] from the mass of [our] fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; ... [leaving] the greater society to look after itself." Christmas movies like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life provide a necessary tonic to such a retreat and call us to see our home and family in the larger communities of our society and world.

THE GOSPEL, TOO, SHIES AWAY FROM celebrating home and family as a retreat from the world, and calls us to reach beyond our immediate circle. Jesus challenges us to rethink our notions of brother and sister, mother and father, demanding that we recognize our membership in a larger family, one that includes all the children made in the image and likeness of God. Jesus also calls us to remake our tables and refashion our homes so we can make a place for the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the stranger, and break bread with those who have no place to call home and no family to care for them.

At Christmastime it might be instructive to remember that the "first" family to celebrate the birth of Christ were people without a home, people who needed to depend on the hospitality of strangers, people who had to flee an oppressive king as illegal aliens. And it might be useful to remember at Christmas and throughout the year that Christ doesn't call us to "go" home for the holidays but to "be" home for the widow, the orphan, and the poor.

PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.