My wife, Mel, and I started having a Thanksgiving Day Christmas movie marathon about eight years ago. It was just after the birth of our youngest. We’d recently moved to Oregon, I’d finished college the year before and it was too expensive to visit our extended family who lived several states away. So we made the best of it on our own. Just my wife and our three kids, watching Christmas movies back-to-back. We create a schedule the week before. The only rule: Whatever we watch, it has to be a Christmas movie and it has to be available to stream. We crank up the TV around 9 a.m. and the kids snuggle up on the sofa. My youngest, Aspen, is almost always in footed PJs, my middle daughter, Norah, curls up with an incredibly large pink and purple Squishmallow and my teenage son, Tristan, wears his usual hoodie and track pants.

As Thanksgiving Day rolls on, Mel and I take shifts on the sofa and in the kitchen, every so often pulling the kids away from the TV to help with dishes or cranberry sauce. But we’re never so far away that we can’t all still see the screen.

Naturally, there are some movie staples. The Princess Switch is always on the docket. Each year, I get to remind my kids that this movie is loosely based on the Mark Twain novel The Prince and the Pauper, and each year they nod, roll their eyes and say, “We know, Dad.” And The Christmas Chronicles is a must because (according to myself and my kids) Kurt Russell is the world’s best Santa. More recently, Klaus was put on the list because, honestly, is there a role J.K. Simmons can’t absolutely crush? Having him as the voice of Santa in this charming origin story was a surefire win for our family, and the kids basically have it on repeat in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Each year, we find new movies too. Last year, A Boy Called Christmas was a huge hit and so was The Claus Family. This year, the kids are pretty pumped for Scrooge: A Christmas Carol and The Claus Family 2. But no matter what we’re watching, what doesn’t change is that Thanksgiving, for us, is about spending time as a family, just mom, dad, the three kids, the cat and the dog, watching Christmas movies and being together. We’re getting excited for Christmas Day, all the while thankful that we have each other, something that became very important in 2020.

During quarantine, our tradition took on new gravity, particularly after we almost lost my wife. In October of 2020, Mel was admitted for septic shock and spent over three weeks in the hospital, with three days in the ICU. I’m not going to lie, we nearly lost her, and as much as I tried to protect my children from the seriousness of the situation, it was hard for them not to realize how close a call this was. Thanksgiving that year really was the first time Mel began to act like her old self.

Sure, she was still terribly thin, but she was up and cooking, side by side with me in the kitchen while Christmas movies played in the living room. I can still remember our kids looking at her from the sofa with a misty compassion in their eyes, grateful that she was still there, still able to spend Thanksgiving with them. By the evening, after we were all comfy and full of turkey and mashed potatoes, we finished off the evening by watching Jingle Jangle, Aspen on her mom’s lap, Tristan and Norah snuggled into her side, no one speaking and everyone just feeling thankful. We were living through a pandemic, and we’d almost lost the most important woman in our lives, but we were still together, watching Christmas movies on Thanksgiving. There was this sense of normalcy, like we were in the eye of a storm. It was a refreshingly comfortable moment we truly needed as a family.

Our situation has changed over the years. Mel’s health is much better now — she’s made a full recovery. And yes, we can afford to travel to visit extended family for Thanksgiving. Maybe someday we will! But this tradition, this one day when it’s just the five of us together, cooking and watching Christmas movies, is honestly a highlight for the whole family. It’s one day out of 365 that I know will be just us, and I’m not ready to give that up. Not yet. So we’re already planning our schedule for 2022, picking our movies, figuring out what we want to watch again and what new movies we want to stream. We’re getting ready to spend another Thanksgiving streaming our favorite holiday flicks and being grateful for each other.