Welcome to the Another Kind Of Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a little something unexpectedly Christmassy for you in honour of the festive season. It’s been the weirdest year, so let’s have a bit of fun…

Meet Jimmy the Raven. He’s a handsome chap, isn’t he?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ravens aren’t very Christmassy!”. I beg to differ – this one was. The unsung co-star of one of the most beloved Festive movies of all time, Jimmy is a minor Christmas legend…

Like so many movie stars of the era, Jimmy’s true origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery. The story goes that he was born some time in 1934, and his nest was found in the wilds of the Mojave Desert by Hollywood animal trainer Curly Twiford, who took him in. His first film role was in Frank Capra’s Oscar-winning You Can’t Take It With You (1938), where he acted alongside the likes of Lionel Barrymore and Ann Miller.

Ravens are intelligent birds, so it hadn’t taken long for Jimmy to learn some useful acting skills. He could type, open letters, understand a certain amount of human language – and even apparently ride a little motorbike! Indeed, James Stewart, the star of It’s A Wonderful Life, described Jimmy as “the smartest actor on the set”, and director Capra clearly agreed, casting the raven in many of his films.

From the late 1930s until his death sometime in the 1950s, Jimmy appeared in hundreds of Hollywood movies (including a brief cameo in another festive favourite, 1939’s The Wizard of Oz), and was considered important enough to be insured for $10,000 by the studio. Quite a sum for a raven!

Despite the fact that he was uncredited in many of his film roles, Jimmy was a proper movie star, with multiple stand-ins on set – and was so well known for entertaining the troops during and after the war that the American Red Cross presented him with a medal.

His last known film was Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s 3 Ring Circus (1954), after which he seems to have gone into retirement. Little information is available about his later years, but his performance in It’s A Wonderful Life remains an indelible part of our Christmas celebrations more than eighty years after his discovery out in the desert…

If you’re feeling festive, you can find lots more Christmas reading and watching from me here – there are now over a decade’s worth of seasonal posts to explore…