WHAT could be more Christmassy than a good old-fashioned PoW drama? GulfWeekly picks the movies that - sometimes inexplicably - get the festive juices flowing.

Here's how a bunch of films became irretrievably associated with the holiday period - even if some of them have as much to do with yuldetide as hot cross buns.

The Great Escape

The Christmas movie as we know it - an all-star adventure, just about suitable for all the family, and probably involving slightly comical members of the Waffen-SS - is an innovation of the 1970s.

There is something ineluctably seasonal about PoW camp dramas such as Von Ryan's Express, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story, Bridge On the River Kwai and Escape to Victory.

It must go deep, because it works beyond the small screen, too: Where Eagles Dare, a whoop-de-do jamboree in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton drag up as Nazis, was a huge hit at the box office at Christmas 1968 - and duly made the journey to television, becoming a holiday staple in the 70s.

The Wizard of Oz

In 1939, the only kind of turkey associated with the Yellow Brick Road was the box office species. But when this achingly odd musical about tornadoes and devil monkeys and shoe-envy was shown on CBS in November 1956, 45 million people tuned in.

So CBS began screening it every Christmas - with the respectful exception of December 1963, when the American public, mindful of the bloody events the previous month in Dallas, were in no mood to hear Ray Bolger bash his way through If I Only Had a Brain.

Miracle On 34th Street

It's a film about a delusional man who believes himself to be the real Father Christmas - the whiskery British actor Edmund Gwenn is the man with the sack; little Natalie Wood the girl who believes he's the real deal.

You don't need a month of white noise and electric shocks to force your mind to place it in the same loop of the Venn diagram as turkey and crackers. But in over a century of film-making, this is the only Santa flick we've really taken to our hearts.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians stirs no warm thoughts. We don't come back from the carol concert and settle down to anything involving Dudley Moore in an elf costume.

I have a theory: unlike its competitors, Miracle On 34th Street never asks us to believe that we're seeing the real Santa Claus - only to enjoy the pleasure of submitting to the benign madness of its central character.

* Without the benefit of another slip of the pen, Christmas has probably lost its power to colonise our sense of when it's appropriate to sit down and watch a particular film. The blockbusters around which the festive schedule was once constructed now appear on the stalls of Isa Town market before they debut on television.