Mainlining Christmas

I know I said I'd see you next year , but that's days away, and... I missed you guys. Besides, I've got something to say. When we started Mainlining Christmas, Lindsay and I discussed, among other things, what would and would not constitute a "Christmas movie." It's not as easy to delineate as you'd think. Originally, I excluded Die Hard, reasoning that an action movie wasn't a Christmas movie, regardless of when it was set. We went ahead with it this year for a few reasons, not the least of which being that we wanted to watch something good. But there's more to it than that. As we've covered more and more classics, the line's gotten blurred. Holiday Inn is considered a Christmas classic: hell, it's where the song "White Christmas" originated. But Christmas actually only represents a small portion of the film's time and attention. The rule of thumb I've been using so far has been that if something feels  like it&

Those of you hoping Christmas would be cancelled this year were once again disappointed: despite opposition to the holiday from both secular groups opposed to the fundamental religious nature of the holiday and religious groups angry about the fundamental pagan nature of the holiday ( this is my personal favorite example ), and the prophesied end of the world, Christmas came just the same. Of course it did. Christmas is a cultural juggernaut ten-thousand years old. It's survived the fall of empires and religions. When early Christian leaders tried to destroy it, it ate their savior and took his name. It's the granddaddy of all holidays, the mother of all festivals, and the drunken, lecherous uncle of all celebrations. As long as the seasons change, Christmas isn't going anywhere. Oh, and we're still here, too. That's right: not VeggieTales nor Barney nor Adam Sandler could break our commitment to the true meaning of Christmas, whatever the hell that is. Mainli

I don’t have a ton to say about this year. I was very busy through most of the Thanksgiving-Christmas run, so getting all of the Mainlining done was more work than I remember it being in past years. I’m still getting used to our new home on the West Coast, so I couldn’t go to my normal shopping destinations, etc. Anyway, this year we watched 92 separate things, which is a new high-water mark for this blog. Breakdown: Shorts: 3 Movies: 18 Episodes: 51 Specials: 20 Erin bought way more Christmas music than we have in past years, I reviewed more books and comics, and we posted more often overall. I don’t know that we saw anything this year that I’d say belongs among the best of the best, but we did have some in the running for worst of the worst. Some of my favorite new things from this year were: Bump in the Night: T'was the Night Before Bumpy Die Hard (okay, this could be best of the best) Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned Nature: Christmas in Yellowstone Paddi

I wanted to say a few parting words about this series, both because I'm proud of it and because it was a pretty intense experience. I don't have exact notes on this, but this definitely felt like the vast majority of time I devoted to the blog this year. By my calculations, I wrote more than 55,000 words of fiction for the blog this year. The total word count for the stories published is actually a little more (just shy of 58,500), but three of these stories were started last year, then finished and published this year. If you're interested, those were "Mistletoe", "One Night in Bethlehem", and "Tribes of Gypsies". Actually, Mistletoe's inclusion on that list is misleading: I had a version started but completely rewrote it from scratch. The first third of "One Night in Bethlehem" was already done and was basically unchanged. "Tribes of Gypsies" gets complicated. I had about a quarter of it done, but that got overhauled

You knew we were going to get to these eventually. They’ve actually been on the list since the beginning, we have them on DVD, but we kept holding off on them, keeping Doctor Who as a sort of fallback option for when we ran out of other stuff or got too tired of terrible things. And then that didn’t happen. So one day last week we just decided to finally re-watch these. Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion (2005) I have very fond memories of the first time I watched this episode. It introduced David Tennant’s Doctor and I loved it. I loved it a little less on this viewing. The murderous robot Santas and trees are still fun, but a lot of this hour is humans being whiny. Whenever Tennant is on it really picks up, but there’s a big boring chunk in the middle without him. The writers were still sort of trying things out with Ten at this point; his character doesn’t solidify for a bit, and that adds to the surreality of watching this episode. Plus the end with Harriet Jones is kinda nas

We're finishing 25 Christmas Eves up the only way that seems appropriate. We've looked at quite a few Christmas Eves so far, but it's time to take a gander at the granddaddy of them all. So, without further ado, Mainlining Christmas presents the greatest story ever told... now improved. By: Erin L. Snyder Based on a TRUE story The innkeeper was a fat man, and he was exhausted. These were the first two observations going through Joseph’s mind upon setting eyes on the owner. And why shouldn’t he be tired? It was late – nearly midnight. And here was a couple, the woman clearly in labor, on his doorstep. The innkeeper rubbed his eyes. He didn’t wait for Joseph to start in. “Look, kid. We’re full up. Sorry.” “What? You can’t be,” Joseph said. “You must have, what, two dozen rooms in this place. Who’s renting two dozen rooms?” “Almost three dozen,” the innkeeper corrected him. “And it’s these damned stargazers. Pouring in from every town for a hundred leagues. Astro

This is only the second episode of Tales From the Crypt produced, and it was directed by Robert Zemeckis (keep in mind this is Zemeckis in '89, back when he making the Back to the Future movies and still awesome; not the current Zemeckis who's been producing CG abominations). I saw a handful of episodes of Tales From the Crypt back in the day, but I certainly never watched religiously. Actually, I suspect I would have watched it religiously had I been able to, but I never had HBO growing up (this also means the episodes I did get to see were tragically edited for content). Lindsay tracked this down on Youtube, and we just finished watching it. I'm really, really glad we did: it was a lot of fun. The episode starts with a woman brutally murdering her husband for the insurance money while her daughter's asleep. When she tries to dispose of the body, an ax murderer dressed as Santa Claus shows up. As you can probably tell, there's not much in the way of plot here.