Mainlining Christmas

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

Okay. First the simple. At time of writing, I've seen two episodes of the Fraggle Rock reboot including this holiday special, and they are really quite good. It's a lot like the original, just gently made more modern feeling. However, this special episode is dancing in the shadow of one of the all-time great holiday episodes, and that means there's a lot to live up to. I think the fairest thing is to talk about it on its own first, and then address the larger context. (I'll mark the sections ahead.) If somehow you are ignorant of Fraggle Rock's premise, here's the quick pitch: A race of cheerful creatures (Fraggles) live in a system of underground caves, in a sort of symbiosis with a race of tiny hardworking creatures (Doozers) and in fear of a family of giant pompous fools (Gorgs). The tunnels also open into a workshop owned by a human who is unaware of the Fraggles and often has a parallel plot line going on. The episodes are usually comic adventures that touc

Here we are, back in Equestria for the holidays again, but not the same holiday we knew from Friendship Is Magic . This special is from a series of follow-ups to the 2021 movie that rebooted the My Little Pony continuity with a huge time jump (MLP: A New Generation). I saw that movie, and I remember it being enjoyable enough, if not amazing. All you need to know about this new special is that it's not terrible, but it's so bland that it's just sort of a time waster for kids.  Ok, all you need to know to follow the plot of the new special is that in the movie a group of young ponies met and became friends: earnest earth pony Sunny, ditzy artsy unicorn Izzy, neurotic rule-following earth pony Hitch, and the princess pegasus sisters Pipp (bubbly pop star) and Zipp (sardonic tomboy). They ended up working together to restore lost magic to Equestria. By the time of the special, people are still figuring out what that means.  The ponies have been living together in Sunny's l

Masters in This Hall K.J. Charles, 2022 After watching so many Hallmark movies this year, I was beginning to forget that humans feel any emotion stronger than the desire for a single chaste kiss. Happily, one of my favorite romance authors came to the rescue with a surprise new holiday novella! This is technically part of her Lilywhite Boys series, but it easily stands alone. The series generally features criminals and detectives plotting schemes and romance in late-Victorian era London. In keeping with the theme, the main character in this novella is hotel detective John Garland, recently fired from his job due to a major robbery occurring on his watch. The man he suspects of the crime has been hired to run a grand week-long Christmas party at his wealthy uncle's estate, so John turns up to try to defeat any further skullduggery.  Of course, he is also desperately attracted to the man, but that should be neither here nor there... The story proceeds apace in Charles's best styl

Despite being a longtime fan of children's media, I admit that Bluey might not have been on my radar if I wasn't the parent of a young child. And that's a shame, because I think this show is funny and poignant enough to charm almost anyone. The show follows the everyday adventures of Bluey and Bingo Heeler, two young sisters (ages 6 and 4) who can and do turn anything into a game. Their parents encourage and play along with the kids' imaginations, and the show is a fantastic portrait of great parents who are still realistic parents. While there are lessons to be learned, they are often subtle, blended into the stories, and sometimes for the adults rather than the kids. The show has honestly made me tear up on more than one occasion. It's popular worldwide for very good reasons. It's also one of the most fascinating exercises in anthropomorphic animal fantasy I've seen in a long while. All the characters are dogs. But they are also people. They have houses an

Revised 2/21/23: The HarperCollins strike is over! A new contract has been ratified, and this belated review is now public. The Afterlife of Holly Chase Cynthia Hand, 2017 How do I describe this book? For starters, I read it as part of this year's Christmas Carol project, and it's both the farthest from the original and the most respectful of it in a certain light. Holly is a spoiled, mean, shallow rich kid at 17, when she's subject to her own three-spirits Christmas haunting. Being a modern teenager instead of an elderly gentleman, she declares the whole thing idiotic and ignores it. Then she's hit by a car and dies. But Holly gets a chance to redeem herself after all, because the Scrooge Project, an odd hybrid of nonprofit corporation and supernatural society, hires a few actual ghosts as part of their team. So Holly becomes the Ghost of Christmas Past. Every year, the team member with foresight picks a Scrooge - someone who is a bad person but could do a lot of good

What is The Hip Hop Nutcracker? "The Hip Hop Nutcracker" is a new special you can stream on Disney+, while "Hip Hop Nutcracker at NJPAC: An ALL ARTS Presentation" is a New York Emmy-winning episode of In Motion on PBS.  Both of these presentations are based on the original stage show (which you can even see live on tour .) Is one of them better than the other? Well, both have their good points, but we think one is clearly more enjoyable to watch. Both are based on a reimagining of The Nutcracker. Short version: In this story, Maria-Clara is a teenager (possibly young adult) who's sad that her parents are fighting. She meets a cute boy who sells nuts from a cart, they fight some magic mice together, and he saves her with the help of some magic shoes from Drosselmeyer. Drosselmeyer sends Nutcracker boy and Maria-Clara back in time to witness the beginning of her parents' romance, then they return to the present and use dance to remind them how much they love e

What kind of fever-dream-caused-by-too-much-eggnog is this? On the topic of Rankin Bass animated specials that we heretofore missed, we actually bought this on DVD years ago and then forgot we never watched it. And we definitely hadn't watched this before, because we definitely would have remembered it. We were left with the overall impression of an animation director with a lot of big artistic ideas, a contracted number of songs, and absolutely no interest in whether the final product makes a speck of sense. The animation designs are stylized in such a way that they don't move well, and the whole experience is best summed up as "odd." The story of the special isn't actually the story of the novella; the credits even say "suggested by," rather than "based on." I think this is a shame, as I actually enjoyed the original story (despite it not really being set at Christmas at all). The character list is pared down drastically and several character

The Last of the Spirits Chris Preistly, 2015 As I continue my dive into Christmas-Carol-adjacent novels, I found this oddity. I guess it's supposed to be for kids? The author seems to specialize in kid's horror, although the books advertised in the back looked like adult novels? For me this one rode an odd line. It's not that it's bad; it just seems so superfluous.   The book invents a young protagonist, Sam. Sam and his younger sister are living on the street in London due to a complex series of catastrophes. One night, Sam is so angered by the idea that some people (Scrooge) have so much when he has so little that he decides he wants to steal from him, or possibly kill him and steal from him.  However, before this can happen, Sam and his sister fall asleep in a nearby graveyard and are accidentally drawn into the world of the spirits, witnessing all of the events of A Christmas Carol. Sam is simultaneously granted his own visions of the past and of the future if he co

The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Charlie Lovett, 2015 After my first two forays into expansions on A Christmas Carol, I was worried that I would never find something enjoyable that respected the source. Happily, this one was a delight. Set ten years after the events of the original story, this sweet and playful novella takes the form of both a loving parody and a thematic expansion. Scrooge is still the subject of gossip in the street, only now the consensus is that he's taking this whole keeping-Christmas-all-the-year thing a bit too far. He's generous beyond his means, affectionate to a fault, and comes off as more than a bit eccentric, wishing people Merry Christmas in July. I was a bit worried early on that the story would conclude on a wishy-washy moral of moderation in all things. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, Scrooge realizes that as one man, he can only do so much to help the world. So he proposes a scheme to the Christmas Spirits to multiply his

You probably noticed that we've been watching a lot of versions of A Christmas Carol. As we went, I started noticing how many musical versions there are. As a lifelong musical theater fan, I'm a sucker for a good musical. Because these are all adaptations of the same story, many use songs in similar places for similar purposes. I find it interesting how these songs can make very different choices, so let's take a few minutes today to explore that together.  I don't remember enough music theory to get too bogged down in whether these songs are necessarily "good" by any specific musical metrics. I'm interested in only a few things:  Does the song support the story, expand the character(s), or enhance the tone? Is it enjoyable to listen to: lyrics understandable and not annoying, tune catchy, performed well?  How do the songs which fulfill the same purpose in the narrative compare across adaptations? Here are the versions of A Christmas Carol I'll be visi