Happy Holidays! Now Streaming the Search for Santa in "It Was Just Like Christmas," Plus One More Amateur Gem
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Santa is front and center in It Was Just Like Christmas (1948)...
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To celebrate the holidays, we’re sharing two Christmas-themed amateur shorts preserved by Northeast Historic Film through NFPF grants.
It Was Just Like Christmas (1948) follows a 5-year-old girl’s search for Santa Claus, while Sweeter by the Dozen (ca. 1950) depicts a day in the life of the second graders at the Westlake School in Los Angeles. Both films were created by Herbert F. Sturdy and feature his young daughter Sally.
Mr. Sturdy was a prominent attorney for the firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, and his clients included Walt Disney, whose will he executed. But according to Sturdy's daughter, filmmaking was “his gift, his talent, his great joy.” He shot 47,368 feet of 16mm film between 1929 and 1968, primarily consisting of home movies, usually on Kodachrome and artfully crafted with cleverly concocted intertitles and delightful graphics.
It Was Just Like Christmas repurposes home movies of a family vacation into a quest narrative, as innocent leisure activities continually reveal hints of Santa’s whereabouts. These take Sally Sturdy on a road trip north, from Los Angeles to Carmel, Mt. Rainier, Victoria, Lake Louise, and finally Jasper National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. Since the film's soundtrack is no longer extant, a lively new score has been provided by award-winning composer Michael Mortilla.
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...but content to remain in the background of Sweeter by the Dozen (ca.1950).
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Sweeter by the Dozen, winner of first place from the Los Angeles Cinema Club in 1951, also won praise from Movie Makers magazine: “Take a dozen or more normally exuberant youngsters in the second grade...mix them amid a day-long session of changing classes, and flavor with the excitement of making a movie—this was the recipe which Herbert F. Sturdy set himself to follow...He has been remarkably and quite charmingly successful.”
The Herbert F. Sturdy Collection was donated to Northeast Historic Film by his daughters. In 2006 the archive received an NFPF grant to preserve It Was Just Like Christmas and Sweeter by the Dozen. This presentation derives from new HD digital masters, created for this purpose. We hope you’ll consider them a holiday gift. Stay tuned for more in 2026!