Season’s Greetings! And welcome to a very special holiday edition of this column, aka “the place where I talk about pop culture into the etheric nothingness.” It recently came to my attention that the Northern Hemisphere’s winter holiday season is upon us; this season is formally known as Secondary to Easter Until Charles Dickens Did Some Good PR for It, or in retail spaces as Hostile Tinsel Takeover. It’s a time for such inexplicable rituals as: setting highly flammable trees on fire (but just in strategic spots); the donning of intentionally hideous knitwear; and putting dried fruit in a cake and rendering the whole thing to the consistency of paving brick. I’ve just been to both TJ Maxx and HomeGoods where it’s a tinselly, plasticky, felt-and-velvet-and-tin festival of angels, reindeer, and gnomes; and as I don’t like to do things by halves, I decided this was also a good time to delve into the preeminent art form of the season: Yea Verily: the low-budget holiday movie.
As I’m sure you’re aware, the Christmas Movie has a history stretching back to approximately 43 A.D., when the legal representatives of the Channel of the Mark of Hall first reached out to acclaimed actress Candace Cameron Bure and offered her an open-ended contract to star in all the Christmas movies until such time as Jesus descends again to earth. I assume that’s the only way she could have made so many of them. Citation might be needed, but let’s move on.
Netflix and YouTube were kind enough to provide me with a varied sampling of the genre, and I had watched parts of Christmas in the Smokies, Switched at Christmas, Christmas with a View, A Christmas Prince, and A Holiday Engagement by 11am on a recent Saturday, when I was ready for a nice soothing glass of hemlock-laced eggnog.
Recall if you will, from your last English class, the major conflicts that drive all great stories: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus society, etc. In this case, we have:
· Woman vs Losing the farm
· Woman vs Planning a Christmas party
· Woman vs Dashed dreams of opening a restaurant
· Woman vs Running her brand-new wedding planning business into the ground
· Woman vs Writing her first big celebrity profile
· Woman vs Marrying a high-powered but jerky lawyer
· Woman vs A snarky hipster ghost
One movie featured Vivica A. Fox as the mother of the heroine, and all she does is stand around her dining room in formalwear making gingerbread houses. If every scene had been more of Vivica A. Fox sprinkling powdered sugar on a professionally pre-assembled gingerbread house while delivering tough love talking points to her daughter, I may have stuck around. Unfortunately I bailed at the point where the hero and heroine started dating and it involved a lot of snowball fights and walks in the snow, but without any appreciable chemistry. I think we can all agree that having a snowball fight with your romantic partner ought to lead to some snowy kissing at the very least.
Which brings us to a major feature of these movies: they are very, very tame. I’d be inclined to put them squarely in the romantic comedy genre – some of them are based on Harlequin novels, for one thing – except that romantic comedies usually strive for some kind of spark, some hint, however circumscribed, of the sexual pull of the beloved. It could be that Hallmark and Lifetime are keeping it clean for the kids in the room. Or it could be that the point of the Christmas Movie isn’t for the protagonist to find romance, but to find belonging, and romantic love is one component of that quest but hardly the only component.
Once I figured that out, I had to reassess the whole endeavor. Do these movies kind of suck? Yeah, yeah they do. But I suggest watching them for their main theme – a sense of place both physical and spiritual. To illustrate using a non-holiday movie, it’s exemplified by the scene in French Kiss when Meg Ryan says to Timothy Hutton that she wants “the home and the family … to plant some roots and see them grow.” Hutton’s character looks at her quizzically and replies, “You want to be a farmer?” And this is how we know that Hutton is not for her. He wants excitement, but she wants belonging.
Belonging, in these movies, isn’t just about having the perfect, anodyne cipher of a boyfriend/husband. It’s about resolving all possible issues – career, love life, and family relationships. This makes for some bafflingly all-over-the place plots, but I can’t fault it for being a pretty holistic outlook on modern womanhood.
Unfortunately, all this life-fixing stuff is on top of the shopping, cooking, and decorating. I mean… Is Christmas doing okay? Because I feel like this is asking an awful lot of a hopped-up sun worship festival! Christmas is probably in therapy right now, talking about how it needs to set some boundaries with us.
I know what you’re thinking: Jeanne, did an excess of Xmas affect your brain? The answer is “most assuredly yes.” But there were a couple of stand-outs, movies I will happily watch again and which you may also find enhancing to a Yule Mood.
The Adequately Charming: A Christmas Prince (Netflix)
A Christmas Prince, starring Rose McIver not being a zombie, and Ben Lamb being a hot prince of a fake country, gets the other 33% of its charm from 13-year-old Honor Kneafsey as the bored and too-smart-for-her-elders sister of the prince. There is indeed a snowball fight, and it’s really cute. Plus a prince riding a horse through some snowy mountains. SOLD. Next:
The I’ll Be in my Bunk Entry: The Spirit of Christmas (Lifetime)
Starring an adorable red-haired lady. And this guy:
AHEM.
He’s the ghost of a bootlegger and he only manifests in the real world at Christmas and does the heroine need to leave her big-city job to fix things that have gone awry at a country inn? You bet she does. If that’s what the kids are calling it these days! BA-DUMP-TSSSSHHH!
No but really, I liked this movie even more on a second viewing. It’s sweet with just the right amount of salty. It’s the bacon/maple aperitif of Christmas movies. Why both the leads aren’t heading up big-budget fare I don’t know. I guess we needed another Matt Damon movie instead.
The It Shouldn’t Work But It Does Entry: Christmas in the Wild (Netflix)
I was fully prepared to shred this movie based on the trailer alone, where a couple of white ladies say “Christmas in Africa? Christmas in Africa!” back and forth like twelve times, leading me to believe that the movie isn’t aware that Africa contains, you know, separate countries. But then I watched it and goddammit Rob Lowe and Kristin Davis. You got me, okay? Your movie is charming and heart-felt. The country is in fact named and it’s Zambia. But can I tell you what I really love about this movie? The leads are not 35 years old anymore. They look like the age they are – albeit extremely well-preserved - and it’s just nice to see people my age having a life, and having their life history be an asset rather than a hindrance.
The Nostalgia Watch: The Family Stone
Yes, I know this movie doesn’t fall into the Lifetime/Hallmark category but it’s just a great movie that I want everyone to love. It has everything! Real snow, a New England house, the kind of large family we all wanted but didn’t get, and pratfalls. It got bad reviews, which I don’t understand, because if you don’t come away from this family-drama-slash-romcom wishing you were raised by the High WASP stylings of Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson, I don’t even know you. Also it has the sweetest example of a character saying “I had a dream about you” and I personally think it’s Sarah Jessica Parker’s most affecting role.
***
And that’s it, kids. That’s how I wasted the weekend before Thanksgiving. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to acquire some pullover sweaters and learn to bake so I can ditch my paying job for the pre-industrial bliss of small town life, where I am sure to piss off every citizen in forty-five minutes max and then get run out of town on a rail. Whether you celebrate Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just the act of surviving your seasonal dysthymia, I hope you will feel steeped like a nice hot tea in the true spirit of the season. Which is: “Having Trouble Dating the Living? Consider Ghosts!” Or “Togetherness: It Makes the Bad Decisions Bearable.” One of those.
Jeanne Obbard is a poetry reader for Drunk Monkeys whose work has appeared in Gingerbread House, Glass, andFive2One. She enjoys botanical gardens, long walks on the beach, and being contrary. She has a blog but has forgotten the password so it’s probably being used to disseminate Russian kompromat now. Safer to find her on Twitter where her very imaginative handle is @JeanneObbard.