Oh I know it’s been hard to avoid them, The Hulk Hogan Family Christmas or was that the Gene Simmons Family Christmas show, it’s hard to tell. Hallmark has run them so often they very nearly forgot to schedule their own Halloween gold mine, The Good Witch series.
But don’t despair; there is even a Good Witch Christmas special, The Good Witch’s Gift.
And I don’t begrudge Hallmark turning up the heat on their sure fire winner and Catherine Bell deserves all of the success she has earned, so run those Good Witches until the big bunny hops into town.
But having said that, and knowing that Hallmark wasn’t the only offender, I can now relax, if I happen to see a Christmas show, I can linger and enjoy a guilty pleasure, cause the official Christmas movie watching season has been begun.
How can I tell? Don’t you know anything? Okay, I know it’s not your fault, your peers probably distracted you when that part of your education came around and for teens it is so easy to be distracted what with the rage of hormones and the clash of cultures not to mention the ebb and flow of the mood swings, it is so tiring to be a teen that you musta missed it.
Thanksgiving Day, when the bird is down to bones and potential tetrazzini, and the television has fallen strangely silent, that’s the time to spread an afghan over dad or Uncle Bob or Cousin Morty and surf through the channels searching for the one true, complete and absolute sign of Christmas yet to come, Miracle on 34th Street.
Of course I mean it. This is the correct and proper time to watch Miracle on 34th Street. For one thing you probably won’t be interrupted with orders to take out the trash or to find the big game or even share the TV with the kids and listen to that moronic dinosaur sing that hideous song for the eleventieth thousand time cause they’ll all be in a turkey induced coma. And secondly this is when the story starts. That’s right; Miracle on 34th Street begins with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
It is a Christmas show and I won’t give away the plot just in case you have been living under a rock for the last sixty-four years or you were captured by Zapatistas and held incommunicado while they waited for your family to earn enough money for you to be worth a ransom demand and then their hopes were dashed when the economy collapsed and even though your people love you like family, well… you are family, they can’t raise the money to bribe a park ranger much less a band of hearty jungle rebels so they have to chop off your head and put it on YouTube and it goes viral and fifty million people see you the one time that you’d just as soon they not. Oh yeah, the plot, let’s just say that the USPS never looked so good.
So settle back, get something warm to drink, slug of high test optional, and spend a charming ninety minutes with
R. H. Macy and some of his employees. You won’t regret it and next year when the bird is done instead of looking for a game that might actually be interesting you’ll get the itch to find the Miracle and watch again.
Now a word of caution, do not be fooled by the awful, colorized Ted Turner abomination, watch the Miracle in living black and white like God and Jack Warner, (Don’t tell Jack I put him second. He never did think there was anything higher up the totem pole than Jack.), intended.
Why not put the DVD of Miracle on 34th Street on your Christmas list. Come-on now, you know that no one in your family is going to spring for that Viper you been hinting about and pardner, getting a Purdey isn’t going to happen either and no matter what the tabloids say, Kim K isn’t so broken up over the end of her marriage that she’d even look at you and just in case you think I’m only talking to the guys, forget about George Clooney too. (George has a line about six blocks long just waiting to be the next ex-arm candy so give it a rest and keep the old coot.)
My favorite granddaughter, yes, I do have more than one, when she was just six went out and bought a copy of the Miracle with her own money, (Not that anyone was a bad influence or anything), and let that be a lesson to you, if a six year old can see the need surely a grown person should have their own copy.
You can of course watch other movies, Home For The Holidays, directed by Jodie Foster and starring Holly Hunter will do the trick and Undercover Christmas is good enough to keep, Crazy for Christmas has Howard Hesseman, that’s Doctor Johnny Fever to you and if you don’t know who that is you shouldn’t be allowed to handle a remote anyway.
But no matter what you do, watch Miracle on 34th Street. If you don’t feel like running out to Wally World when it’s over and buying a present for your good-for-nothing sister who married the biker and moved to Eagle Pass and runs a bar/internet café with a very unsavory reputation, you just don’t understand, Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a frame of mind!
And I’ll bet your Mr. Sawyer doesn’t know that.
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