Even more than the 2008 election, I was really glad the Palins didn’t kill Santa Claus and mess up Christmas for the entire planet
I am almost positive that there was only a one-day separation between Halloween and Thanksgiving. I mean, it really seems like it was only yesterday that I was on a bus to New York for the marathon. Now here it is, almost a month later and I find myself rolling into Christmas and still writing in my blog. How many days of continuous activity does something need in order for it to become a habit? Seems like I need to abstain from consuming chocolate with the same level of commitment that I have in writing this blog. But that’s not going to happen, especially now that it’s the holidays!
I’m surrounded by Christmas stuff, and according to the commercials that I have seen on television, everyone should be getting either new houses or new cars with big bows from their loved ones the 25th (sorry to ruin the surprise everybody!). Furthermore, the guy from TD Ameritrade is telling me that it’s now time for Americans to get back into the stock market, but this time everyone’s gonna do it “smartly”. Well that’s a relief- I’m sure glad that I have the advertising medium to notify me that this economy crisis thing is finally over!
Apart from the constant commercialism that is now the holiday season, the television is also advertising some mighty crappy holiday programs that will offer you a return to simpler, more airbrushed remembrances of things past that never really happened anywhere at anytime. I’m talking about the Christmas specials that feature solid B-list actors who provide a person the only marginally-passable excuse for devoting more than five seconds of their attention to these bad storylines. A copy of Entertainment Weekly Magazine (what? I read it for its high-brow movie reviews) has also pointed this out, and that’s where I’m getting a list of this year’s holiday movie specials:
The Dog Who Saved Christmas
A Dog Named Christmas
The Christmas Hope
Santa Baby 2: Christmas Maybe
A Golden Christmas
The Three Gifts
As you can see, the quality level hasn’t improved much since I was a kid, where we had taped on VHS Jaclyn Smith’s “The Night They Saved Christmas”. In this show, she and her husband live up in Alaska with three kids, and her husband, an oil driller, is about to blow up the North Pole because the word is that there’s big oil underneath Santa’s Workshop. The North Pole is barely spared thanks to the speediness of ‘snow machines’ that arrive only seconds before the button to dynamite is pushed. Todd and Sarah Palin of 1984 anyone? Sounds like a little prescience on the part of NBC. Who knows? Maybe there actually will be a dog that one day saves Christmas…
I’ll have to tune in just in case.