With movies like "Surviving Christmas," "Christmas With the Kranks" and last year's hit "Bad Santa," Christmas - according to Hollywood - has become something to endure rather than celebrate, and that sentiment is breeding a whole new genre of anti-holiday holiday movies. ....

The themes are hardly unusual. Last year's theatrical hit (and this year's hit on DVD) "Elf" features Will Ferrell as a Candide-like believer in Christmas cheer who encounters nothing but cynicism and scowls on his jaunt through Yuletide Manhattan. And in "Bad Santa," Santa is actually the bad guy - a con artist out to rob a department store on Christmas Eve. ...

Nowadays, "you make fun of Christmas," said the film historian David Thomson, who has just published a history of the industry called "The Whole Equation" (Alfred A. Knopf). "I think it's more current now to say that Christmas is this dreadful family occasion where relatives who don't like each other come together and get drunk and start fighting. A lot of Christmas movies are rather like that."

The old-time genre of sincere, values-oriented Christmas movies still exists, but it seems to have migrated from the silver screen to television, where James Stewart appears faithfully every year, and where this season viewers can tune in to the latest treacly tales, like NBC's recent musical version of "A Christmas Carol" and, on CBS, "A Very Married Christmas" and "When Angels Come to Town."