Christmas time, to borrow a phrase from Charlie Brown and the gang, is here and with it comes all the yuletide traditions: hot chocolate, festive tunes, gingerbread men—sorry, gingerbread persons—and, of course, Christmas movies. It’s a Wonderful Life! Miracle on 34^th Street! Scrooged! Those claymation movies from the ’60s and ’70s that aren’t actually very good, but skate by on pure nostalgia! And, as is wont to happen, such old classics have been joined over the years by more recent offerings, like the Jim Carrey Grinch remake, The Polar Express, Elf, and Love Actually, movies that, in their brief time on this earth, have ingratiated themselves into the holiday season to the point that they’re regularly lumped together with Miracle on 34^th Street, et al., as Christmas “classics.” The only problem is: they’re not.

Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the quality of these movies—though, cards on the table, I do think most of them are not very good, especially Elf—but merely suggest that we jump the gun in declaring modern works “classics.” The simple fact is, we don’t get to contemporaneously decide what earns the title, and, what’s more, are probably the worst judges of what from our pop culture deserves such esteem. We have a say in how popular a work is, certainly, but as Anthony Patch posited in The Beautiful and Damned, a classic needs to be more than popular, it needs to prove it’s not just a trend by “surviv[ing] the reaction of the next period or generation.” And to do so, it has to be something of enduring value, something that isn’t just a product of its time but speaks to eternal themes, to the common human experience.

It’s difficult for us to evaluate recent works because we often struggle to differentiate between what speaks to our culture and what transcends it. We know the references, the actors, the very world in which the movies are set. And with social media and Netflix and smartphones creating an outsized role for pop culture in our lives, there’s a sense of nostalgie du present—or nostalgie du just a little while ago—in our relationships with our culture. It’s for these reasons that we tend to rate new movies, television shows, music, etc. as being better than they actually are, in a sort of bizarre artistic recency bias. Out of a generational arrogance, we assume both that our cultural preferences are on par with, if not superior to, those who came before us and that they will be shared by those who come after. But times change and tastes change along with them.