Silent movies - A Christmas Dream

As mentioned on Monday, I want to give each of my December posts a Christmassy touch, and of course that also goes for my selection of silent movies.
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about my "Little Lord Fauntleroy" marathon, whose 1980 version is one of Germany's beloved Christmas classics, and how I didn't have the patience for watching the silent movie version with Mary Pickford (how things have changed), so that would be an obvious first choice, right? Wrong. Like the book, that version doesn't end with a Christmas feast.
But are there any silent Christmas movies at all? Luckily, I found two pages which listed several for me and I just needed to pick.

Let's start with something short by a good old friend - Georges Méliès.
It's "La Rêve de Noël" from 1900, "A Christmas Dream".
Usually I would give you the plot, but there really isn't one.

The children are asleep and dream of
Christmas while the nanny keeps watch.

Dance of the toys - granted, some of them are a little
weird and the jester loses his shoe, but ok.

Angels dropping gifts in the chimney. I guess Santa
needed a little break and they offered to help out?

Kids (and the verger?) ringing the bells while
people come out of the snow into the church.

See the old man with the beard? He and another
beggar had been out in the snow, mostly ignored by
the wealthy people entering the building. When he
comes inside, the servants try to throw him out, but
the Christmas spirit made the host drag him (quite
literally) back to the table to give him food and drink.

The children have woken up, it's time for gifts.
I have no idea what kind of gift that huge cat
head is, but I definitely want that!

Gathering around the Christmas tree.

So this dream consists of vignettes which annoyed some people who missed a plot (you may remember narratives were not yet a big thing back then, so I'm not sure what their problem is).
It actually made me think of a picture book for children showing random Christmas scenes that has come to life.
Méliès even included two scenes with poor people as if he wanted to remind us of what Christmas is about.

I'm not saying that it was a masterpiece and there was a lot of (not that amazing) dancing, but I liked seeing the costumes and the lovely sets that were so typical for Méliès (even if they made me wonder about the time we were in).
So I didn't regret investing those incredible four (!) minutes.


Thank you to Sarah Cook for the post "Old movies: a celebration of Victorian Christmas films" on "Film Stories", December 6, 2022!