Over the holidays it is most likely that you watched “Home Alone,” either on cable or a new DVD or that ratty old VHS tape you dug out of the basement. I chose the VHS route and hooked up an old VCR to my TV in the living room. For some reason I’ve never picked up a DVD copy.

Home Alone is now a bonafide Christmas Classic surviving the test of time. It makes you wish John Hughes would return to making movies. Where did he go and with it where did his sense of humor regarding family life go?

It seems that Mr. Hughes is satisfied with retirement. He now lives in the same Chicago Suburbs that he featured in his films, with those brick houses you could never understand someone being able to afford–the one in Home Alone is huge! He no longer spends time in the Hollywood arena and leads a very quiet life at age 58.

There are very few holiday films that can survive to become classics. Many of them, like A Christmas Story, take a roundabout way to acquire that status, but Home Alone was a hit with audiences as soon as it entered the theaters. It has all of the sentimental holiday elements and then it threw in slapstick to clinch the deal.

And it showed us an imperfect family, which is often what John Hughes did with his writing. Kevin’s family is downright mean to each other and Kevin’s final remarks to his mom before he is grounded up in the attic are pretty terrible. But that’s what families do, if we were to be honest. One moment a kid is telling his parents he hates them and the next moment he’s looking for a hug.

I can’t think of any recent Holiday family comedies that have the potential to become a classic like Home Alone. Yes, the blockbuster is dead, and yet I would think some writer/director somewhere would be putting down his nostalgic thoughts into a script that could stand the test of time. After all, cable reruns of A Christmas Story made that movie a classic; a recently made sleeper film could run the same course.

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