Mainlining Christmas

Black Friday's Eve is about tradition, something we at Mainlining Christmas hold in the deepest reverence. Our night began with a feast, of course, since we'd need energy for what comes next. Once we'd built up a healthy layer of fat, Lindsay and I set out into the cold to celebrate the holiday and kick off the holiday season. We could think of no better place to start than Walmart, that bastion of holiday cheer and stalwart shrine to American culture. We arrived around 10:30 PM Thursday and found a parking space, no small feat on this night, as you can see above. The lights in the parking lot shone off the cars and SUV's like decorations. We made our way through the near-winter wonderland of vehicles and reached the front, where a handful of police cars were lined up to help maintain order. The line of eager shoppers wrapped around the store. There were families of all shapes and sizes, many with young children, there to enjoy the festivities,

The Christmas Basket Debbie Macomber, 2002 Premise: Girl met boy, lost boy, left hometown in a terrible snit, returns years later successful but lonely career woman to face boy, their feuding moms, and Christmas. Wow. Romance is silly. I mean, anyone who says otherwise is just deluding themselves. It's not necessarily bad, but it is darn silly. Particularly this light bit of fluff from noted romance author Debbie Macomber. Apparently Ms. Macomber writes a Christmas book every single year, so a friend suggested she'd be a good choice to spotlight for Mainlining. Why did I read this one? It was available at my local library and it won an award. Simple as that. I flew through this book in a single evening, and most of the details have left my brain already, but for romantic fluff, it wasn't bad. Sure, every single character was a sitcom-level moron and they all deserved the stupid pits they’d dug themselves into, but it was still okay to read. The main problems w

Arggh. I knew I should have just fast forwarded past this without looking. I found this on a VHS of programs recorded off of the Disney Channel when I was small.  This is one of the stupidest specials I've seen in a while. Not quite scratch-my-own-eyes-out, but that's mainly because it's short. Okay. The Tiny Tree is a completely nonsensical special about a tree that lives in a meadow with a bunch of folksy animal friends who all have different caricatured regional accents. A little girl and her family move into the house by the meadow, and the tree and the animals make friends with her. You have to understand that the little girl is in a wheelchair, but doesn't seem to be able to reach the wheels for some poorly-animated reason, so this amounts to a handicapped child being repeatedly kidnapped by a bunch of half-clothed, talking animals. But it's okay, because the child loves the tree. Now, I loved trees as a child, but the way the narration keeps stress

Huh. That was.... not as bad as I expected. You have to understand, I basically hate Family Guy. There were a few funny episodes early on, but the characters grate on me to such a degree that watching the show makes me feel somewhat ill. So it was with much trepidation that I settled in to watch this. For the first two-thirds of the episode, it went basically as expected. Erin and I sat there in revolted, stony silence as the terrible attempts at “jokes” rolled out. Unnecessary crudeness that just wasn’t funny, pointless twists in the service of yet more unfunny lines, and a building over-the-top sitcom-style disaster that mostly had us rolling our eyes. Then there was a tiny little Christmas miracle: it got funny. The third act followed through from what had gone before, but ramped up the craziness in a way that actually worked! We laughed, we sat up, suddenly interested, and were rewarded with biting, funny commentary on the manufactured nature of the holiday, a solid amount of amu

About ten years ago I wrote a novel called For Love of Children  about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy teaming up to (among other things) fight the Bogeyman. I spent a lot of time trying to find an agent, but no was interested in something that out there. Three years ago I gave up and published it myself. At about the same time, Dreamworks started production on Rise of the Guardians, a movie about five characters (included the aforementioned 'big three') teaming up to fight the Bogeyman. I've been asked by several people if they stole the idea from me. The answer is no: they announced production had started a few weeks before  I released my book. So unless they had access to a time machine, they couldn't have heard about it beforehand (and, so far as I know, they still haven't). They based the movie on a series of books William Joyce was working on at the time (these started getting released last year). I keep meaning to check those out but ha

In the span of a few decades, Black Friday has grown from a trivial footnote to a major part of the Christmas season. As such, it is surely fitting that the day not be excluded from one of the most significant holiday traditions. I refer, of course, to warfare. War is only an integral part of Christmas figuratively speaking, of course: people don't actually die in the fights between Christian groups fighting for the right to erect lighted shrines to pagan tree spirits and secular groups demanding that the phrase "Happy Holidays" be substituted for its synonym, "Merry Christmas." No, the war over Christmas is actually a cold war. Casualties are unheard of. Black Friday, on the other hand, is no stranger to bloodshed. People have been trampled to death, shot, and stabbed. But, until now, these have been isolated events: more skirmishes than an actual war. But that may be changing thanks to a new trend: Black Friday Eve. The day before Black Friday

I'm a little confused how this exists. I knew that someone did a rather silly-looking reboot for Strawberry Shortcake in the early 2000s, around the same time a bunch of 80's franchises for girls got ill-fated re-imaginings. But we bought this used, and it's a VHS.  A VHS! In 2003. Wow. It's a good thing we bought this 50-cent used VHS tape, though, because if we hadn't, I would be unable to report to you that the tape itself is berry-scented. Just like the dolls. Onto the actual content: surprising no one, this is pretty bad. Not “Oh God, my eyes!” bad, but just without any production values to speak of. I mean, I guess the animation isn't terrible. However, what they chose to animate is incredibly boring. There is basically no plot to speak of, and so the characters just meander around an impressively dull world for 45 minutes. It is in fact like watching a particularly unimaginative six-year old try to plan a party. Picking out presents is a nearly