Saturday, December 3, 2011

Sometimes the Christmas Season comes around and it is a blustery evening and you have only one impulse, desire and wish: to watch a Cheesy Christmas Movie. And not just any Cheesy Christmas Movie, but one of the Hallmark/Lifetime variety. They're a special blend of mediocre (at best) writing, luke warm acting, costuming that inevitably looks like it came from the 2003 December issue of What People Who Dislike Themselves Wear magazine and heart-warming fake snow with a mistletoe kiss or two.
You find yourself craving that certain sort of holiday comfort found in the predictability of the three possible plot lines and the jazz flute remixes of Christmas carol classics ranging from Silent Night to Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
And sometimes you seek to satisfy that craving. So you log on to Netflix from your Mac Jacobs and peruse the assortment of Christmas fudge and cheese balls in the form of Recipe for a Perfect Christmas and Mrs. Miracle. After you've made your selection you watch with the rational half of yourself (which at any time of the year would probably be considered reasonable and worth listening to, but at this time and season sounds more like Scrooge in his miserly hay day) screams at you that what you are watching is manipulative, stupid and poorly done. But the other half of you (where sugar plums dance, everyone wears blackwatch plaid fancy dress with red shoes and lives on carmalitas, poppy seed bread and mint brownies) stuffs a sock in your rational self's mouth and activates your tear ducts.
Yes. You. Cry.
You cry because the two love interests just don't know how to communicate yet but they've got to before Christmas Eve or the pageant will be ruined and the children will become fully dysfunctional instead of just charmingly high spirited and mischievous. And then your throat starts to close up when, finally, just before midnight on Christmas Eve, the whole thing turns out all right. The new family made up of the love interest protagonists and charmingly high spirited children spend time with the old family that consists of a newly forgiven sister, her husband and their strange animatronic baby (only Lifetime still uses animatronics, guess a real baby just isn't in the budget). The tear slides down your cheek, the same shine as silver tinsel on the perfect Christmas tree on the film set.
And so help you, you're almost surprised that it all worked out so well. That is, until the credits start rolling and you come off your Hallmark high and remember that what you just watched was #1 in the three plot choices for those movies. But despite that, you are Christmas contented and everything looks like you've drunk the milk of human kindness offered to you by the Ghost of Christmas Present in Lifetime's sixth version of A Christmas Carol.
Sometimes that happens. Only sometimes.