CHRISTMAS traditions start somewhere – whether it’s the Victorians’ idea of sending each other cards, or the Germanic concept of decorating a pine tree, what feels like timeless practices have their beginnings in the here and now. In decades to come, merry-makers may well ask why a Plasticine dog and his idiotic, gadget inventing owner are treated with reverence.

The answer is the BBC programming team, who have made Wallace and Gromit an annual must-do over the Christmas period. This year, not only do we get the usual frolics, there is a whole new W & G adventure for us to enjoy.

And alongside the Aardman Animation output, the defining children’s writer of our times, Julia Donaldson, provides the bedrock for all that is good on the TV. As well as new adaption of her superb rhyming couplets of Tiddler, the little fish with a big imagination, reruns of Zog and his flying doctors, Stick Man and others are on screen offer. Such is their brilliance, it feels unfair on adults to call them children’s shows: they are charming to all.

Christmas Eve

Chicken Run

On BBC One, The great Aardman adventures begins with Chicken Run (10am), the tale of the hens who plot their own Great Escape from the evil poultry farmers.

We stay in the countryside for Shaun the Sheep: the Flight Before Christmas (1.20pm), before moving to Julia Donaldson territory with the much-anticipated adaptation of one of her best-loved books: Tiddler (2.35pm) is the fish who is late for school every morning because of the adventures on the high seas he has swam through.

Over on BBC Two, Alec Guinness and John Mills star in Great Expectations (9.50am). In the field of Dickens adaptations, this remains a standout, a genuine epic. Beeb Two’s clever programmers have followed it up by laying on Beetlejuice (10.45pm), followed by The Rocky Horror Picture Show (12.15am).

Martita Hunt in Great Expectations

A mainstream channel somewhere has to find room for It’s a Wonderful Life (2.30pm), and ITV has given James Stewart the stage. It’s become a stone cold message of the season classic – but was barely noticed when released in 1946. Its screening licence ran out in the early 1970s, meaning cinemas could run it for free – and it prompted Scrooge-like cinema owners to unwittingly create a new tradition.

Many of our homes face an alien invasion over Christmas from the descending relatives, so it feels fitting on Channel Four we have Spielberg’s 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (11.25am). They follow it up with the hyper-comic-violence of Home Alone (1990), a family film that has aged badly in terms of the baddies’ injuries and the terrible parenting.

Christmas Day

BBC One have family smiles all over it: the best ever Toy Story (11.20am) – part III – gives children something to do before lunch, while we head into Despicable Me territory with Minion: the Rise of Gru (iPlayer, 12.55pm), followed by the new Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (6.10pm).

Channel Four likes to show its rebellious side and that means showing films with the flimsiest seasonal sense, if at all. But boy do they have fun digging out cinema landmarks. The Italian Job (2.45pm) is the Swinging Sixties on celluloid. They are offering the Indiana Jones films, beginning with the unbeatable Raiders of the Lost Ark (8.20pm). For fans of films that show our nation in a flattering if unrecognisable light, Notting Hill (1999) is followed by East is East (12.55am).

Cary Grant in North By Northwest

BBC Two gives us Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers (10.15am) and Grand Day Out (10.45am). Immediately after the King’s Speech, we head to Miami to join Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon on the run from the Mafia in Some Like It Hot (1959). It is followed by Hitchcock North by Northwest, featuring Cary Grant looking the best turned out any Hollywood lead has ever been. The day ends with the Alan Bennett adaptation, The Lady in The Van (10.20pm), starring Maggie Smith.

ITV has a day of staple downmarket series, sitcoms and game shows, while the standout film is the Home Alone sequel, Lost In New York (3.10pm). And one must feel sorry for poor actors, never quite knowing where the next meal is coming from – and it is with this in mind that ITV offers us the 2022 film, Downton Abbey: A New Era ( 9pm). The story takes the cast from their English country pile to explore a villa in the south of France the Dowager Countess has inherited. What an excuse for a cast beano on the production company’s expense sheet!

Boxing Day

Over on BBC One, Matilda The Musical (5.45pm) brings Roald Dahl’s madcap tale to life with standout performances across the board: Emma Thompson as Ms Trunchball will haunt school-age children till they get their A-level results.

And they finish off Boxing Day by offering us the chance to get into the water with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break (12.10am). Kathyrn Bigelow’s surfer / bank robber action film is good looking and hilariously dated. Watch for both nostalgia and to laugh at some of the tasteless nonsense we accepted back then.

On BBC Two, viewers can immerse themselves in the Golden Age of film: we have a Bogart and Bacall double-header with The Big Sleep (10.55am) followed by Casablanca (12.45pm). Then it’s to the Wild West for The Magnificent Seven (2.25pm) – Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Eli Wallach and Charles Bronson get together. Can you imagine seeing this mob galloping towards you? Would make the most angelic walking among us quake.

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

ITV’s big-ticket film for the day after the big event is Grease (3pm). It could be asked, in the light of the billion-plus high school romances that have been made, how a 1977 John Travolta and Olivia Newton John vehicle still has any relevance to a modern audience? Watch Grease and learn that such questions are futile, pointless and frankly disrespectful: Grease is still The Word, as the title song boldly states.

And then it’s a Christmas date with New York beat cop John McClane. This time, Bruce Willis’s tough guy is tasked with taking down a cyber criminal. Live Free or Die Hard (10.15pm) sounds rather dorky – what action could a computer hacker offer, drinking fizzy drinks at their desk at 3am? Don’t fret – Willis wouldn’t sign up for part four of Die Hard unless there was a sweaty white vest in the wardrobe and a few violent deaths.

Finally, Channel Four finds two sides of our common national psyche to consider the first is our martial spirit (or lack of) in the film adaptation of Dad’s Army (2pm). From the Home Front to the Boar War, Zulu (3.50pm) is the Michael Caine epic set at the siege of Rourke’s Drift. A testimony to the brilliance of the British film industry in the 1960s.