Plenty of cinematic attention has been given to Christmas and Thanksgiving. By now, probably at least three different versions of A Christmas Carol have aired on a TV channel near you, and the Christmas Story marathon is in the offing. As much as I have enjoyed these yuletide chestnuts, the spirit longs for something more . . . more! And I don't just mean movies set on or around a holiday. There are some good ones: Jodie Foster's Home For The Holidays (Thanksgiving) comes to mind, but I doubt there's a run on copies of that DVD each November. I'm talking about movies that capture the spirit of a holiday, the kind of movies that are required viewing and that different generations in a family appreciate.

I think that filmmakers have shamefully neglected several deserving holidays. Holidays like...

1.) Mardi Gras
Here's a perfectly good holiday lacking film treatment, or at least film treatment that doesn't include key phrases such as "Playboy" or "___ Gone Wild". Oh sure, there have been movies and made-for-TV programs set around the theme of Mardi Gras, but where is that definitive Fat Tuesday movie? Bet you a ten-spot you can't name a movie that will glue your butt to the couch each and every Lent.

2.) Walpurgisnacht
Say wha…? Well, it's this European holiday at the end of April that's basically a night for witches to cavort. There are bonfires and all manner of potentially creepy goings-on. Harry Potter films would be exceptionally lame substitutes for a straight-ahead Walpurgisnacht movie. No less amazing movie luminaries than H.P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker set stories on Walpurgisnacht, horrific tales where hell opens and the servants of the evil one revel. If that isn't horror movie fodder, I don't know what is. Bring it.

3.) Mother's Day
Hey now! It's not because I'm a card-carrying member of the mothers' guild. It's because you have to reach all the way back to 1948 (I Remember Mama) for Mama to get her movie propers. Far more likely in recent times that screen mothers will be either monstrous (The Manchurian Candidate, The Sopranos --no, Mommie Dearest is NOT a Mother's Day movie), quirky (Anywhere But Here, Igby Goes Down), or just plain dumb (any Tyler Perry production). "Marmee" (again, Susan Sarandon) in 1994's Little Women comes close, but…

4.) Juneteenth
That's right! You're not from Texas. If you were, you'd know that Juneteenth is the annual celebration of when news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally made its way to Texas (and that would be June 1865, two years and six months after the Proclamation went into effect).

Now this could get messy, because it seems to me that the most likely kind of movie to come out of Juneteenth would be some treacly educational after-school-special kind of film, perhaps with grateful, depressingly noble black folks celebrating Juneteenth today and telling the young ones about the origin of the holiday, which would be shown in flashbacks of depressingly noble black folks, of course. I can already see Phylicia Rashad and Keshia Knight-Pulliam queuing up for this one, and I gotta say, eeeeww. A better way to go would be the John Sayles-ensemble way, with a racially and politically charged story (hmm, like Lone Star, say).

Got a holiday that needs recognition? Tell Mama.

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