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.
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...
It might be seen as a tradition now, but like most traditions, the origins were practical.
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)
I hope that these shared cultural experiences can occasionally pull us back together after being scattered by algorithmically generated bubbles of social media.
One year the station wanted to play a different movie during the holiday season and people wrote petition to bring it back.
https://www.npo3fm.nl/nieuws/3fm/389107-home-alone-niet-op-t...
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]
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!
Every year. Don’t know why or if it’s still true (not living in France)
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.
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.
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)
And this article is from 2009 for christmas's sakes.
