Long Island homes have been screen stars since the silent-picture days, and from bungalows to McMansions are still going strong. There's the architectural variety, the easy access to New York crews and actors, and the fact Long Island can stand in for anything from an Amazonian rainforest to Anytown, USA. And that includes Christmasy Main Streets that can put New England's to shame.

Over the last two decades especially, Long Island homes have shown up in a plethora of Christmas movies. And homeowners, say filmmakers, are almost uniformly happy to have their houses appear.

Partly, that's because movie productions rent homes here for "anywhere from $500 to $2,500 a day, depending on the location," said Peter D'Amato, the Albertson-raised director and co-writer of the locally shot "Christmas vs. The Walters" (2021).

"That would be in the ballpark," agreed associate real estate broker Heidi Karagianis, 56, of Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty, who as Heidi Topper was a locations manager for films including "Sabrina" (1995) and "End of Days" (1999). "It might even be a little light, depending on where it is," said the Port Washington resident. A rate of “$2,500 day for a house in New Hyde Park is totally fine, but if you're in Sands Point" with its mansions, "they might not think it's worth it. I've had exteriors where it's been up to $7,000 a day just because it was something that was so important for the film. And I've paid somebody in a house next door $500 just to put a [filming] light on their doorstep."

There is certainly disruption. "You have 100 people in your house. You have to be prepared for the mayhem," Karagianis said. "But it's an experience people generally enjoy when they give themselves to it."

And in some cases, homeowners get a staycation at a local hotel. In addition to paying rent for use of the main house in "Christmas vs. The Walters," said D'Amato, "We put the family up in the Melville Marriott for two weeks" because the home's interior also was used for the movie.

Does having your home appear on film increase its market value? Only indirectly, said Karagianis. "It definitely gets more eyeballs on the house." Does it help if it's a Christmas movie as opposed to a grisly thriller or horror film? "The storyline is important," she noted, "unless it becomes a very famous show like 'The Sopranos,' where tons of terrible things happened but people are still able to say, 'Hey, this was the Sopranos' house!' "

And even if the market value isn't affected, "You have bragging rights for sure," said Shirley's Jessica Tenney, 38, a real estate salesperson with Realty Connect USA. What's more, she added, "Even your neighbors have bragging rights!"

Here are six movies in which Long Island houses portrayed Christmastime homes.

There's way more Long Island than North Pole in the classic "Miracle on 34th Street." Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) lives in a retirement home at the fictional 126 Maplewood Dr. in Great Neck. And the film later shows what is unquestionably the most famous Long Island Christmas-movie house of all, on Derby Road in Port Washington.

Divorced Macy's executive Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) has hired Kringle as the department store's holiday-season Santa. His quiet insistence that he's actually the real thing goes against Doris raising her young daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) to be scrupulously realistic.

But Susan eventually begins to believe, and shows Kris a picture of a suburban house in which she wishes she and her mother could live. At film's end, mother and daughter drive down Derby Road with Doris' fiance (John Payne) when Susan suddenly tells them to stop the car. She then she runs up to a house for sale that matches the picture. Doris and Fred follow her in — and find leaning against a wall a walking cane exactly like Kris'.

Orrie Frutkin, who, with his wife, Goodie, and their children, moved into the 1943 Cape Cod-style home in 1980, told the New York Post in 2011, "We just love this house. We knew it was something special before we even knew it was a celebrity house." He added, "We're happy to see people's eyes light up when we tell them it's the house in 'Miracle on 34th Street,' but to us, it's just a cozy, comfortable place to live."

In her 2004 autobiography, O'Hara recalled shooting that final sequence during a bitterly cold winter that froze the cameras' mechanisms.

"Luckily," she wrote, "a very kind woman, Vaughn Mele, lived across the street from where were filming and offered us her home to thaw out the cameras. We gratefully accepted, and I was happy for the chance to thaw out myself as well. ... I consider Vaughn Mele's generosity one of the 'miracles' of 'Miracle on 34th Street.' "

Filmed in Holbrook, St. James, Selden and Smithtown, this well-reviewed seriocomedy by Smithtown-raised filmmakers Tyler Taormina and Eric Berger (plus co-writer Kevin Anton), about a large family holiday gathering in the 2000s, uses as its main location a house in St. James.

That locale came about through producer Krista Minto, who grew up in St. James, said Taormina, 33, who, like Berger, now lives in Los Angeles. She arranged to have the local fire department lend its decorated trucks for a February 2023 shoot re-creating the community's annual Holiday Parade of Lights. "We came to be filming this parade sequence on Fifty Acre Road," Taormina said, and saw a house just off it that fit the production's needs.

Another home exterior in the film is on Derby Place in Smithtown, "next door to where I grew up," said Berger, also 33. "The owners had just passed away and I knew the house was not being lived in, so I spoke with their children and we just sort of worked it out. So it was a funny coincidence it became available, because I knew that house all my life."

Did being in the film help its market price? "They did end up selling it for a surprisingly higher value than what I'd anticipated," said Berger, "but I don't think it had anything to do with the film."

Released theatrically Nov. 8, the film came to streaming Dec. 3.

Shot for three weeks in December 2020 in Greenlawn, Huntington and Lindenhurst, this comedy follows a highly pregnant Type-A mom (Shawnee Smith) navigating Christmas preparation, wrangling her family and trying not to blow her top with her smarmy neighbor and his much-vaunted Christmas-lights display.

The Walters' house, on a cul-de-sac on Cloverfield Court in Greenlawn, was a referral to director and co-writer Peter D'Amato "through some mutual friends on Long Island," said producer Rob Simmons, who lives in Suffolk County. "And then we just kind of prayed and hoped that one of the neighbors would agree" to make a nearby home available as well, he said. "It makes the exterior shots much better when you can just pan over from one house to the other. Our locations manager just knocked on a few doors and it worked out perfectly" with the house literally right next door, Simmons added.

The movie, with a cast including Caroline Aaron, Bruce Dern, Chris Elliott, Dean Winters and local comedian Christopher Brian Roach, held its world premiere at the AMC theater in Huntington on Nov. 5, 2021. It is available to stream and on DVD.

Filmmaker-actor Edward Burns ("The Brothers McMullen") grew up in Valley Stream, and though he now lives in Manhattan, he often shoots on Long Island — and he returned not only to his hometown but also to his old block for this holiday story.

"It was a friend of the family's home," said Burns, 56, of the primary locale for his tale of adult siblings debating whether to welcome home for Christmas the father who deserted the family 20 years earlier. "It was literally around the block from the house where I grew up," on the intersecting Marlboro Road. "It was an easy ask." Another holiday house seen in the movie is in Rockville Centre.

Burns, who recently published his first novel, "A Kid from Marlboro Road," and is in final editing on his upcoming "Finnegan’s Foursome," stars in the film along with Kerry Bishé, Caitlin FitzGerald, Noah Emmerich, Connie Britton and others. The film currently is unavailable to stream, but has been released on DVD.

Most of writer-director Kevin Jordan's semiautobiographical Christmastime drama about a failing family lobster business is set and was shot in Brooklyn. But two Rockville Centre houses were used for scenes with more prosperous characters, one on Harvard Avenue, the other on Judson Place. Jordan knew the terrain, having grown up in Rockville Centre and graduated from South Side High School there.

The film, "presented by Martin Scorsese," stars Danny Aiello and Jane Curtin. After premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2005, it won the Long Island Audience Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival the following month, and was released theatrically that November. It currently is not streaming, but is available on DVD.

Long before ABC's "The Great Christmas Light Fight," Sound Beach author and screenwriter P.J. McIlvaine envisioned two neighbors whose escalating feud in an annual Christmas decorating contest gets so out of hand their town forbids public holiday celebration. The two men, of course, must band together to save Christmas. Filmed primarily in Greenlawn, where it is set, the movie also shot in Centerport, Northport and East Northport.

McIlvaine, 68, said she was introduced to the director, John Dowling Jr., an East Meadow-raised artist, photographer and fledgling filmmaker, who "wanted to see what I had, so I sent him the Christmas movie and a couple of other things." She said she heard back the same day that he wanted to film "The Town That Banned Christmas."

Through his art-world connections, said Dowling, 61, who now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, he was able to cast the film with name stars including Matt McCoy, Jane Sibbett (Ross' first wife on "Friends"), supermodel Carol Alt, Robert Clohessy ("Blue Bloods") and Huntington-raised Adam Ferrara.

At some point, Angelo Santomauro and Mike Forman, partners at the Huntington title-insurance company All State Abstract Corp., came on as investors and executive producers. "Our office used to be in Greenlawn," Huntington native Santomauro, 61, recalled. Dowling "was looking for locations and spoke to one of my clients who happened to be in the same building. And she said, 'You should talk to these guys.' "

Not only did the two businessmen put in money but, said Santomauro, "Quite a few scenes were shot at my home at the time," on Arbutus Road in Greenlawn during that Christmas season of 2005. "My house basically was turned into a studio. All the actors were in the playroom downstairs" as a holding and makeup / wardrobe area, "and the upstairs living room and my bedroom were where some of the shooting was." Another exterior in the film is a house on Oakwood Street in Greenlawn.

Difficulties arose — not uncommon on low-budget films with a first-time director — and Dowling, having completed what he estimates was 90% of the shoot, left the production. Filmmaker Karl Fink, Sibbett's husband, came on to complete it.

Never released theatrically, the movie debuted on DVD through the now-defunct Peace Arch Home Entertainment. "That version of the movie," said Santomauro, "was a little bit different than the version" that debuted at the Long Island International Film Expo in July 2006 under the title "A Merry Little Christmas." "Peace Arch did clean up the movie quite a bit," he said, and released it under its original name.