By Daria Radler

Ah, Christ­mas! The hol­i­days are around the cor­ner, and this means a com­bi­na­tion of an incred­i­ble amount of deli­cious food (don’t we all love Grandma’s cook­ing?!) as well as presents and some qual­i­ty time with our fam­i­lies that we’ve either looked for­ward to or have secret­ly dread­ed for months. Either way, I’m sure that by now you have prob­a­bly estab­lished a lit­tle fam­i­ly tra­di­tion of your own when it comes to decid­ing on your ulti­mate Christ­mas movie selec­tion. So let’s look at a few movies that should def­i­nite­ly make your list.

1. It’s a Won­der­ful Life (1946)

George Bai­ley has spent his entire life devot­ing him­self to the peo­ple of Bed­ford Falls. Bro­ken and sui­ci­dal on Christ­mas Eve, he decides that his fam­i­ly and friends would be bet­ter off with­out him. What he doesn’t know is that they have prayed for him to get through these hard times, and that their prayers have been heard: His guardian angel Clarence falls to earth to show him how dif­fer­ent the lives of his loved ones would have been if it wasn’t for him. Heart­warm­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and deeply mov­ing, It’s a Won­der­ful Life teach­es us how much it means to look after one anoth­er – a mes­sage that makes this movie worth watch­ing over and over again.

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By Michaela Keck

On Fri­day, Octo­ber 16, our group of five – two mas­ter stu­dents, three bach­e­lor stu­dents, and I – set out from the Insti­tute of Eng­lish and Amer­i­can Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Old­en­burg for a four-day excur­sion to the eco­log­i­cal field sta­tion of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pots­dam in Gülpe. This small vil­lage is locat­ed approx­i­mate­ly 70 kilo­me­ters north­west of Pots­dam, or cir­ca 85 kilo­me­ters north­west of Berlin, along the east­ern bor­der of the Nature Park and Dark Sky Pre­serve West­havel­land. Here, we want­ed to study, debate, and direct­ly expe­ri­ence dark­ness in an area that still afford­ed a phe­nom­e­non that is increas­ing­ly lost to our bright­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Euro­pean con­ti­nent: dark night skies. The plan for this long week­end was to have the after­noons set aside for text dis­cus­sions and to ven­ture out into the dark after the moon had set. The morn­ings were free to either recov­er from our noc­tur­nal activ­i­ties or to explore the wet­lands of our imme­di­ate surroundings.

Includ­ed in our con­sid­er­able amount of lug­gage – the eco­log­i­cal field sta­tion requires self-cater­ing – were three sem­i­nal texts for our eco­crit­i­cal stud­ies of dark­ness: Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Sav­ing Our Chil­dren from Nature Deficit Dis­or­der (2005); Paul Bogard’s The End of Night: Search­ing for Nat­ur­al Dark­ness in an Age of Arti­fi­cial Light (2013); and the chap­ter enti­tled “Ridge” from Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007). Although the titles of the first two books express a sense of loss and there­fore sug­gest a yearn­ing for an ear­li­er, bet­ter, more “nat­ur­al” life, Louv and Bog­a­rd both inves­ti­gate the Anthro­pocene with an atti­tude that com­bines curios­i­ty, fas­ci­na­tion, and prag­ma­tism rather than regres­sion, nos­tal­gia, and mor­al­iz­ing. Read more »