I don’t have many Christmas or Hanukkah traditions (beyond getting manically into holiday decor, melting a candy cane into my coffee while I wrap presents, and listening to Kacey Musgraves’s A Very Kacey Christmas album, that is), but one favorite activity involves going over to my best friend’s house for our annual Yuletide sleepover, changing into my plaid flannel Lanz nightgown, and firing up The Family Stone. Even though we rewatch the Thomas Bezucha-directed film quite literally every year, it somehow never gets old—so you can imagine my delight when I learned that we could soon be getting a sequel.
Granted, it’s somewhat heartrending to imagine the cast of The Family Stone reuniting without onscreen matriarch Diane Keaton, who died in October at the age of 79 and whose character Sybil’s death forms the emotional climax of the film. Clearly, Bezucha felt no different, telling CNN this week: “I’ve been haunted by the loss of Sybil for months now while I worked on [the sequel] so this was a blow on a tender bruise already. Mentally, I’ve been spending time in that house where I’ve been missing her for a while already.”
According to Bezucha, the rest of the original cast of The Family Stone was enthusiastic about reuniting, which is a relief (I certainly don’t want Sarah Jessica Parker to reprise her role as the worst girlfriend-in-law of all time unless she actually wants to!). The sequel hasn’t been greenlit yet—maybe some executives at 20th Century Fox need to be visited by three ghosts, each bearing a message about the past, present, and future?—but I, for one, am moving the speedy release of this sequel to the very top of my Chrismukkah list.
