When stuff happens is very important in drama. I’m talking here not of the precise moments when red herrings are discovered, allegiances betrayed, love declared and so forth, but the time in the calendar when events take place. This after a week in which I’ve seen The Merry Gentleman, which as its title suggests is set in part over Christmas, and the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 which similarly unfolds on Christmas Eve. For that matter so does Die Hard.

What is it about Christmas that makes it a good time to set a film? Well, that all depends how you want to use the holiday. In The Merry Gentleman it’s a convenient time for two lonely people to get to know one another in the absence of any other social contact. In The Taking of Pelham 123 the date is critical because it means that activity at the edge-of-town police station is at a minimum, and the blizzard that hits the city pretty much cuts it off, which suits the antagonists just fine.

Thanksgiving is popular with filmmakers too, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters a classic example. The American holiday is all about family coming back together, wherever they are geographically and personally. As such, it’s a brilliant opportunity to have a bunch of relatives sitting round a dinner table with a variety of agendas going on between them. Sibling rivalry, parental expectations, whether you’ve brought a partner and what gender they are, children and their behaviour…all fantastic stuff to create tension and humour.

The periodic exchange of gifts and news is a chance to compare your own stock in life to that of those you’ve grown up with. If you’re successful, that doesn’t make it more or less likely that you welcome the success of your brothers and sisters: the Kennedys were a fiercely competitive clan, and who knows what the atmosphere is like when the turkey is carved and Dickie and David Attenborough pass their plates for a slice? I’m reminded of the tale of Anthony Burgess who, getting his literary cock out with another man of letters (I forget who), ultimately and pathetically tried to trump his peer by declaring that he was primarily a composer, not a novelist, on the basis that he’d written a few orchestral pieces and had them performed.

If Christmas and Thanksgiving are an opportunity to see yourself in the eyes of others, birthdays can be used to get characters to explore themselves in light of their expectations of what they’d like to have achieved by their current age. Again, wonderful opportunities for resentment, sourness, and other good dramatic stuff. Just don’t get your characters singing Happy Birthday — sisters Mildred and Patty Hill came up with the tune and words and established their ownership of it for decades before selling it on to a lawyer who continues to make oodles out of the ditty, which is why writers and directors come up with all sorts of cunning dodges to avoid using it.

Christenings can be an even greater opportunity to foment disharmony in families. Having a brother or sister drop a sprog is a classic cue for envy from siblings, a shift to new grandparental status for parents, and unsolicited child-rearing wisdom from pretty much everybody who has ever warmed a bottle.

Which leaves weddings and funerals. A chance for people to put their suits on and hang out with the extended family, the chief distinction being that the food is served at a table in weddings, and as a buffet in the case of funerals. Again, the opportunities for rivalries to surface, regrets to be inappropriately aired, family secrets to be weaponised, make these times of high dramatic and comedic potential.

When you’re planning your story, think about what significant dates it could include. Judiciously placing Valentine’s Day, a retirement party, or a wedding anniversary could give you delicious opportunities to put the heat on your characters, and there’s nothing like watching people sweat to give audiences the chance to empathise with what they’re going through.