Christmas Starts Early

Normally, Mainlining Christmas has kicked off with Thanksgiving, then deluged you with as many reviews as possible until Christmas. That's been the gimmick from the start; hell, it's implied by the name.

But while that makes sense in the abstract, as this blog has evolved from essentially a tongue-in-cheek celebration/mockery of the quantity of holiday-themed media to a semi-serious analysis of that media, the length of our reviews has expanded considerably. Although a handful of you might have been willing to read three posts a day of us typing a few quick paragraphs making fun of some TV Christmas movie in 2012, I can say with relative certainty no one is actually interested in reading more than one full-length review of some movie you've never heard of from the 1940s that no one other than me is willing to die on a hill to get it labeled a "Christmas movie."

So this year I want to try something a little different. I want to aim for one post a day, rather than three. But since I'm not remotely sane enough to pace myself accordingly, that also means I've got a hell of a lot more movies to discuss than there are days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The solution is obvious: we'll just start early. Very early. Like, tomorrow.

But since I'm not (quite) stupid enough to openly declare war on Halloween, the first month's posts are going to come with a blood-soaked olive branch to fans of October: I'll limit my reviews to horror, noir, and other movies featuring death, dismemberment, and good old fashioned murder. All of which is possible because last year I stumbled across a couple lists of Christmas horror movies significantly longer than I expected.

The other side of that coin is I'll be burning through a lot of the Christmas horror movies on my watchlist over the next month, so it's unlikely this is going to be what we do going forward. This is a "this year" approach, not the new normal. As far as what comes next, well... damned if I know. Like everything else these days, let's just take this one year at a time.

But for the time being, join me (and also most large stores in the United States, which are already stocking their shelves for December) in welcoming in October with a heartfelt cry of, "Merry Christmas!"