Mainlining Christmas

Book Review: The Merriest Misters Timothy Janovsky, 2024 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. This romantic spin on The Santa Clause makes for some real holiday magic. Premise: Patrick and Quinn met, fell in love, got married, moved into their own house. Everything you're "supposed" to do. But their marriage is cracking under the pressure of family expectations, unspoken resentments, and unfulfilling careers. That's when Patrick unexpectedly gets a most unusual opportunity, and Quinn's along for a wild ride all the way to the North Pole.  Well, the library gods were kind to me and provided this last-minute holiday gift! This might be my favorite Christmas read of the season.  Think The Santa Clause, except instead of a guy killing Santa, becoming Santa, and fixing his relationship with his son, Patrick injures Santa (who unexpectedly quits), becomes Santa, and fixes his relationship with his husband.  Santa is mag...

This half-hour animated special appeared on Disney+ this year, and it's very pretty, but not much more than that. The story follows Moon, a young owl whose impulsive optimism gets him into trouble; he hides from an eagle in a big tree that is then cut down and sent to NYC for Christmas. Moon runs afoul of some territorial pigeons and ends up lost in the city, where he eventually runs into a human girl, Luna, who is also alone. They travel around the city together over montages and music.  Moon wants to get back to the tree because his dad said to stay put. At first, Luna helps him get back to Rockefeller Center, but when they finally get there, she realizes that other owls won't be able to find him. So she reaches out to adults for help getting Moon home to the forest, and help for her to get home as well. Everyone is home for the holidays: The End.  At the very start, the singing narrator (John C Reilly, evoking Rankin-Bass, but not quite nailing it) explicitly tells us that ...

Book Review: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret Benjamin Stevenson, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a weird one. It's book three in a series, and I haven't read the others. However, I think the bigger factor here is that this book (and its series) is written in a particular style of extremely meta humor which... isn't for everyone. Ernie Cunningham was a mystery buff before his life turned into Murder, She Wrote. With two solved murders under his belt (and written into the previous books, which exist in the world of the story), he's beginning to get a reputation. Enter - the Christmas Special. (The prologue literally has the narrator say that this is a Christmas special.) It's the lead up to Christmas, and he's traveling to see a magician do a holiday benefit show, because the CEO of the nonprofit the benefit is for was murdered, and Ernie's ex-wife (currently the nonprofit guy's ...

Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Julianna Keyes, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all.  Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after.  Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.) The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmaltzy, feel-good story, and they both str...

Book Review: You're a Mean One, Matthew Prince Timothy Janovsky, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, although despite the title, it turned out this story is more inspired by/related to Grinchy themes than a retelling of any kind.   Premise: Matthew can't believe he's spending Christmas in the tiny town his mom grew up in, instead of with his friends in NYC, preparing to throw another epic New Year's Bash for the (other) richest kids in town. But apparently he made one mistake too many and has been banished while PR is spun. Making things worse, he's sharing space at his grandparents' home with a local student who is entirely too self-righteous (not to mention gorgeous).  Okay, I might have an addition to my list of favorite romance authors. (I have enough for a list now! Years ago, I never would have thought it.) This was delightful.  First I want to acknowledge the biggest things that make this story work,...

Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her magazine website job that she's t...

Book Review: It's a Fabulous Life Kelly Farmer, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Here's an obvious one.  Premise: It's a Wonderful Life, but cheap-Netflix-remake ready.  I've often been a bit of a cynic when it comes to It's a Wonderful Life, and this book didn't cure me of that.  To me it reads like a romance novel full of very standard modern-romance-movie tropes - Girl lives in small town, but wants to move to the city. Girl's high school crush moves back to town and they reconnect. Both get roped into helping with a town holiday festival. Minor drama as girl can't decide whether to stay in town with first love or strike out for dream life in city. Magic of Christmas makes girl appreciate her life in town and decide to stay with first love. The fact that both girl and first love are female just makes it a modern romance, not an untraditional one.  And actually, that part of it is fine. Sweet,...

Book Review: Just Like Magic Sarah Hogle, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, and I think I read somewhere that this one was loosely inspired by the Grinch, but it's not a super strong connection.   Premise: Bettie had it all. She lost it all. She accidentally summoned a holiday spirit. Now she's got a one-way ticket back to the life she wants, unless she realizes she wants something else instead. I'll be honest, I almost quit reading this book. I hated Bettie. She was awful. She was useless. She was a self-pitying mess of a person who wasn't ever in any real trouble, despite the terrible decisions she'd made and things she'd done.  She was a mess partly because she'd briefly been a child star, but I didn't have any sympathy, because she was also a washed-up wannabe influencer who was trying to scam her way back into relevance rather than admit to her (extremely wealthy) family she needed help.  The...

Book Review: The Kingdom of Sweets Erika Johansen, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, starting with this very different take on the Nutcracker.  Premise: A party. A magical toy from a mysterious man. A trip to a wondrous land of sweets. Plus betrayal, torture, and death. Not a story for kids. So I have to admit that I was annoyed fairly early on in this book because it's a dark fantasy based on the Nutcracker, only it's about Clara's goth sister, and yet her name is NOT Marie. I mean, the idea of there being two girls was right there!  But no, the goth bluestocking sister is called Natasha. Natasha and Clara are twins, but Nat was supposedly cursed at their christening by Drosslemeyer, while Clara was blessed. Clara grew up beautiful and sweet, but a bit vapid, while Nat is spiky and awkward and reads books and learns the servants' names.  I was worried early on that the book would lean too hard in her being ...

Being who we are, we've probably watched more documentaries about professional Santas than most people (such as  Becoming Santa ,  I Am Santa Claus ), and we even highlighted a book profiling a variety of professional Santas ( We Are Santa ). When we started up this documentary, we weren't sure how much of it would cover familiar ground, but the perspective here was specific and unique, and overall, I was impressed. Part of the film documents the particularly wacky vibe of the titular Santa Camp, an annual weekend retreat in New England for professional and aspiring Saint Nicks to come together and socialize and learn tricks of the trade. This setting provides many artistic and surreal shots and you can tell why the idea tickled the fancy of Australian filmmaker Nick Sweeney, who told The Guardian that he loves "documenting subcultures."   Of course, that article leads with the real core of the film: the founder of Santa Camp, Santa Dan, (along with strong support fro...

FYI: This show is watched by our 4-year-old. Her feedback will be included in this review. WorldWorld is a PBS show (originally 2007-2011) that teaches preschoolers basic spelling and phonics along with some other positive messages. I've always found it generally amusing, although the in-world rules raise a lot of questions.  All the things, including the characters, are physically made up of the letters that spell their names. And if you can spell something, you can create it. For example, if you line up the letters H, A, T, you now have a hat. So it's a bit like the Star Trek question of why anything would be scarce in a world with replicators, but it's an exponentially larger issue here because the characters find letters basically anywhere (they don't seem to be a finite resource) and in several episodes, it's established that you can pluralize words to create infinite stuff.  Each half-hour episode includes two separate stories.   The Christmas Star This story...

Here's another parent review for y'all. At some point earlier this year, my daughter decided that she was interested in the Minnie's Bow-Toons shorts that are available on Disney+. And I discovered that there's a whole dang animated Disney Junior universe. As far as I can tell, first there was a popular animated show for preschoolers about Mickey Mouse and friends called Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Minnie's Bow-Toons is a series of shorts spinning off of that show. But after the original MMC stopped airing, it was retooled and returned as a new show in a similar style: Mickey Mouse Roadster Racers, which ran for two seasons before the format was changed again and it was renamed Mickey Mouse Mixed-Up Adventures. This spawned more sets of spin-off shorts, including new seasons of Bow-Toons, now called Minnie's Bow-Toons: Party Palace Pals. The latest season of Bow-Toons, Camp Minnie, changes up its format even further to focus on outdoor activities. There are even mor...

Christmas Holiday William Somerset Maugham, 1939 I had been reading a number of brand new holiday books that feel as though the authors hope they'll be turned into movies, so I felt like switching gears to try a much older book that was actually adapted for film. If you read our review of the movie , you may remember that Erin mentioned that a lot of aspects were changed in the adaptation. The largest is that in the movie, the main female character gets the most emotional development, and her story, told mostly in flashback to the ostensible point-of-view lead, gets the most screen time.  The novel, on the other hand, actually has a main character. Charley Mason is not an American GI with anger issues, but a British dilettante. His wealthy parents have pretensions of being knowledgeable about art, and at one time he wanted to be an artist himself. At the time of the novel, he's been talked out of that, and instead, he has been preparing to take over his father's safe, sensi...

Long Live the Royals was an extremely brief miniseries that aired on Cartoon Network back in 2015. When I say extremely brief, I mean it's just four 11-minute episodes long. But this was the year after Over the Garden Wall, and the bar for Cartoon Network miniseries was impossibly high. That's probably why this mediocre absurdist piece seems to have vanished almost without a trace.  (It's currently available to stream, though, which these days might just mean that the people who worked on it didn't have great contracts so it's cheap to keep up.)  The setting here is somewhat muddy. A royal family presides over someplace (all the descriptions of this show say Britain, but that isn't corroborated in the actual show as far as I remember) that at least includes a castle, a forest, and a town of peasants. It's a mashup time period, with most people dressed vaguely medieval-ish or "old-timey" and a strongly feudal society, but also smartphones and laptop...

The Matzah Ball Jean Meltzer, 2021 To start with, the premise of this book has a lot of holes in it. Rachel grew up in a close-knit Jewish community, but she secretly loves all the trappings of Christmas, and is, in fact, secretly a highly successful Christmas romance author. Her childhood frenemy-turned-love-turned-enemy Jacob is now a wealthy entrepreneur who throws expensive events for a living, and he's going to be back in town to manage the biggest Hannukah event ever. Rachel's publishers want her to be more "authentic" and ask her to write a Hannukah romance. She despairs because "there's nothing magic about Hannukah" but decides the only way to get the inspiration she needs is to get to that sold-out party. Cue misunderstandings, arguments, romantic tension, etc. Just two of the questions this raises: 1) some Jewish folks care an awful lot about not giving in to the red-and-green juggernaut called American culture in December, and some don't. ...

Here's another random show that my kid likes. The Book of Pooh was a Disney Channel show telling new Pooh stories with puppets and CG backgrounds. Looking back at it today it's a bit dated at times, but at other times it resembles pop-up illustrations or watercolors in an interesting way. Like many kids shows, it features music and mildly educational content. In this special Christmas episode, Roo can't sleep on the night before Christmas Eve, so Kanga sings him a song-story about a magic wish-granting tree that appears if there's snow on Christmas Eve. Side note: Kanga and Roo weren't in the first season of this show, so I hadn't seen much of their house before this episode. Roo's bedroom has a boomerang displayed on the wall and a prominent toy koala. I think that's a cute touch. Kanga doesn't completely finish the story before Roo gets distracted and then falls asleep, so Roo assumes the tree grants any wish for anyone (which is not what she said)...

Three Holidays and a Wedding Uzma Jalaluddin and Marissa Stapley, 2023 New Release! A copy of this book was provided by Netgalley for the purpose of review.  I joke sometimes about how modern romance novels of a certain type are more movie pitches than books. This one definitely started out that way, but by the end, it was at least a corny movie I think I'd enjoy. I guess the authors know what they're doing there, both have had projects optioned for film or TV according to the bios in the back.  In the first chapter, we meet Anna. Anna is ready for her perfect Christmas with her boyfriend's perfect family, she has to be. Otherwise her perfect boyfriend's perfect family won't be happy if everything doesn't go perfectly.  If you guessed that Anna's boyfriend is like a parody of "the guy who is bad for our heroine," you'd be right. But after a whole scene of me wincing at everything he says, he leaves ahead of her because she has to complete a wor...

We don't cover many random sitcom episodes anymore, but this one has been on my list for a while. This isn't a case of a childhood memory for either of us or a show that someone recommended: this is an episode I saw on a Wikipedia list of Christmas episodes, and I said, "Wait, there was a show with WHAT premise?"  Someone finally uploaded it to YouTube, so I was able to watch it.  An overall note: if, like me, you flinch at characters embarrassing themselves and constant, loud laugh tracks make you wince... maybe brace yourself before you try this one. The Charmings was a short-lived sitcom in the late '80s about Snow White and her family (along with one of the seven dwarfs and her wicked mom) magically getting zapped to modern-day California and having to adjust to life there. Presumably this was pitched as similar to fish-out-of-water shows like Mork and Mindy. I thought it would be more of a secret-identity-in-the-suburbs show like Bewitched, but they don't...

The Christmas Swap Talia Samuels, 2023 New Release! A copy of this book was provided by Netgalley for the purpose of review.  Margot and Ben are driving to Ben's family home for the holidays. So far, so normal. Except Margot and Ben met through work a week ago and aren't actually dating, but are planning to lie to Ben's family so his parents will stop making him feel bad for being single. The story gets even wackier once Margot starts to actually fall for Ben's sister Ellie. Meanwhile, Ellie can tell something is weird about Margot and Ben's supposed relationship, but she jumps to a lot of downright farcical conclusions.  This new holiday romance was quite good, although not exceptional. The characters do a few very dumb things that cause some painful miscommunications and misunderstandings, and those made me cringe. I've described the premise, and you need to be ready to suspend your disbelief a lot early on to get on board with Margot and Ben's initial pla...

If you didn't know there was a made-for-TV Christmas movie in which almost all of the supporting roles are played by former contestants and judges from RuPaul's Drag Race, now you know.  As you can probably guess, it's a fairly unique entry in the pantheon of holiday flicks. Like anything with a strong gimmick, viewers who are very familiar with the source material will probably get more out of moments that are clearly cameos and references than we did. But even though I've only watched one episode of Drag Race, I still enjoyed this.  It's funny and biting, it pushes the envelope (of course), and manages to be charming as well. The film does overstay its welcome a bit. It could have been a tight, hilarious 45 minutes, but at 86 minutes aspects of the underwritten characters get a bit tedious, and the jokes become especially hit-and-miss in the middle.  I want to mention something I alluded to above, that the supporting roles are mostly drag queens. The main characte...