Hallmark Christmas Movies

Today I am grateful for Hallmark Christmas Movies.  Oh boy.  What a bunch of formulaic tripe.  Bah-Humbug!  So what has my tinsel in a bundle today?  I’ve been down for the count for a week with an asthma/lung/whatever infection that has literally knocked me on my generous ass.

 

The doctored upped the steroids because I wasn’t improving.  Swell.  Sometimes they make me feel a little out of whack, making it hard to focus on anything for very long stretches.  I’ve decorated the house in 30 minute increments so that’s one plus.  A friend sent me our next book club book so that gives me something to read during the 20 minute breathing treatments.  It takes about a half an hour to throw something in the crock pot, so I’m good there.  Plenty of time for twelve naps before it’s done.

 

Although I haven’t been completely useless, no matter how little I do, eventually exhaustion wins out and I sit in front of the TV and zone out.  Hallmark Christmas Movies are perfect for that because I don’t have to concentrate on a thing since they are all the same.  They should have warnings, “No actual thinking was done in the making of this movie.”

 

My teenage boyfriend lived in an upper flat with his mom and grandma.  Grandma Schultz was a hoot, standing four-foot-nothing, she drove a huge Chrysler that looked like it was driving itself, even though she was propped on a pillow behind the wheel.  She’d talk to anything she saw along her path.  “Look at that tree.”  “I wonder why that ball is in the road.”  She did the same thing watching TV.  “Oh, there he goes, through that hallway.  Don’t do it.  He’s waiting for you.” Or  “No, door number one!  Choose door number one!”  We used to tease her and laugh at how silly she was. . .talking to the TV like it could answer back.  Crazy old lady.

 

Now I am her!  The crazy old lady talking to the TV!  The latest movie was set in Memphis. . .at Graceland.  Snow everywhere.  Icy, frozen snow, even though the sun was glimmering off of it, it never dripped once.  It was like it was Antarctica except no one closed their coats or even wore them half the time.  Because it was, well, Memphis.  I’m sure they get a flake or two of snow but not the winter wonderland that was portrayed.  I try to placate myself with the working actors and crew and how they have jobs, but it’s a stretch.

 

So here’s me, sitting in my steroid stupor.  “Who wrote this shit?  Maybe they should have actually visited Memphis in December.”  Then the heroine, who is FROM Memphis, comes home from Chicago to save the day at a local bank.  The handsome, sweater laden, bank owner is beyond cliché’.   “If I’m going to give the reins to someone I want to be sure the sleigh will stay on course,” he says.  Really? Barf!

 

Then the same heroine, who has magically and literally bumped into her boyfriend, back-to-back, yes, in front of Graceland (no shock here), is weighing the option of staying or leaving.  That theme is universal in all of these movies.  When the movie is in its final ten minutes it goes into. . .”I-have-to-get-on-a-plane-and-leave-right-now-because-otherwise-my-life-as-I-know-it-will-be-over-and-I’ll-miss-all-of-this-and-cry-into-my-perfect-eyelashes-everyday” scene.  In my movie set in Memphis, the actress is sitting a bench, with the old-boyfriend-performing-partner and says, “I hate to leave Memphis because it is almost like coming home for me.”  By now I’m screaming at the TV.  “It IS HOME!  You just said you were born there.  That’s what a hometown is!

 

Add to that the fact that it snowed every single time someone was outside and that the hometown girl, of course, decided to surprise said man and stay to save-the-show.   Enter the snow machine, except it only seemed to snow around the piano in that scene.  And up.  The snow blew up!  It was enough to send me into full-throated Grandma Schultz!

 

“Why don’t you hire writers who can actually put a story together?  Good enough isn’t good enough!  C’mon, people crusty, frozen streets in Memphis?  Snow shooting up?  Do you think that’s enough lip gloss?  She looks like an oil slick!  Where do they get guys with that much hair?  I know no one with that much hair?  How come two pre-pubescent girls meet for the first time and become instant friends, with neither having an attitude.  Shouldn’t at least one kid call the two thousand craft projects perpetually spread all over a dining room table big enough to land a plane, stupid?!  Nope, they just slide in and start making glycerin snow globs out of mason jars and whoopee all is grand. . . .”

 

Okay, I’ll stop. Except, Hallmark Christmas Movies are like a big vat of peanut butter blossom cookies. . .the ones with the Hershey’s kiss on top.  I tried one and now I can’t seem to stop.  I’m addicted.  I’ll let you know when it’s time for an intervention.  I might be close.

 

I have a new plan.  Until I’m back to 100%, I’m recording them.  I have the DVR set for three of them today.  That way at least I won’t have to watch the commercials and if I nod off, which is very easy to do, I won’t miss anything.  As if.  And when the inevitable happens, I can pretend it’s old Grandma Schultz screaming at the TV and not old me!