Pizza night movie logbooks

Keeping track of our favorites

Hey y’all,

In the beginning, there was pizza, but no movies. My youngest son would get too sad or scared or upset to sit through a feature film. “One day,” I thought, “One day we will be able to all sit down and eat pizza and watch a real movie together.”

That day came during the first Christmastime of the pandemic, when the youngest was approaching age six. We started with gentle, short viewings, like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Muppet Family Christmas, It’s A SpongeBob Christmas!, and even Elf. (My log notes that “Jules cried, but we made it through.”)

In 2021, when the boys were 8 and 6, Friday night pizza and a movie truly became a family ritual, something we looked forward to every week, something we did almost without fail. We quickly ramped up to stuff like Batman ‘66, The Sword in the Stone, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Star Wars, etc. The Common Sense Media website helped a lot: we could review the plot lines and fill the young one in on what was going to happen and assure him that everything would turn out okay.

I keep track of all the movies we watch in the day’s entry in my logbook, but I hadn’t made a big list of them until recently.

One star = Everybody really liked it, would watch again.

Two stars = Everybody loved it, feels like a classic.