For me Mickey Rooney has always been synonymous with classic movies. After all, he is a movie icon. One of my favorite Rooney Christmas movies, going back to my teen years, is “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear”. This one is from 1984.

The movie stars Rooney as Mike Halligan, a retired New York City cop now living with his daughter and her family in California. It’s quite clear he misses Christmas in NYC when the family goes to pick out a tree and he complains about the trees being all different colors and there is no snow. We learn of his plan to take his grandson Robbie (played by Scott Grimes) to NYC for Christmas. A few days before Christmas Halligan is putting up Christmas lights and suffers a fatal heart attack. In a fantasy twist to the movie, while waiting to check in at Heaven’s gates, Halligan makes a deal with the archangel (George Gaynes) to return to Earth to fulfill his NYC Christmas trip with Robbie. The archangel makes a deal with Halligan: he can return to Earth temporarily, but he must seek out a wayward angel in NYC named Wiley Boggs (William Griffis) who was sent to NYC to restore the Christmas spirit. But has now just been running amok.

Much to his daughter’s protest (after all, he just died and came back to life and now wants to take off to NYC with her son), Halligan and Robbie leave for NYC because a deal is a deal. His daughter and the rest of her family tag along because, hey, you just died but now you’re alive and what the hell is going on?

Long story short, Halligan and Robbie track Wiley throughout the city and finally catch up with him where he reveals that he has given up on spreading the Christmas spirit and that Halligan can tell the archangel that he found him but he didn’t succeed in doing what he was supposed to do.

Robbie comes up with the idea that if Wiley couldn’t spread the Christmas cheer, maybe he and Halligan should do it. They take to the streets singing Christmas carols. Then with the help of a reporter (Annie Potts), who has been desperately trying to find stories about the Christmas spirit to report for her broadcast, they are able to spread their message to the whole city.

I won’t reveal the entire ending but Rooney’s last line in the movie kind of hits you: “Life is what you make of it”.