Mainlining Christmas

As soon as the weather started to get wet and cold around here, I started thinking more about tea. On a whim, I picked up a six-flavor assortment from Stash Tea Company called "Holidays Are Here." The six flavors include two caffeinated black tea blends and four decaf herbal teas. This is this year's selection, although it seems that the company has offered slightly different combinations of flavors in other years.  Cranberry Pomegranate This has a nice fruity smell, similar to other berry teas I've had. It was a bit more tart than I expected from the smell, but it grew on me. I did find the flavor a little thin alone, but a touch of honey balanced it nicely. Cinnamon Vanilla The tea bag smelled strongly of cinnamon, although mostly I tasted the rooibos tea base. Happily, I like rooibos. It is a nice blend with a mildly spiced aftertaste, although definitely not much vanilla at first. The flavors deepened as the tea cooled, which I found to be the case with most flavo

We've watched a lot of Nutcrackers over the years, but nothing like Debbie Allen's Hot Chocolate Nutcracker.  Created as a showcase and fundraiser for the Debbie Allen Dance Academy (DADA), the Hot Chocolate Nutcracker appears to follow the rough outlines of the traditional ballet (girl gets toy at party, toy breaks, magic happens, crazy tour through fantastical realms), but replaces the standard dance and music with dialogue, comedy, and a vast and ever-evolving variety of musical and dance styles.  I say "appears to" because this documentary follows the rehearsal and backstage information about the show. It's not a recording of a full performance, so we only get to see snippets.  Interspersed with clips of rehearsal and interviews with young performers, we also get basic background on Allen's career, the founding of DADA, and some of the ongoing barriers facing Black dancers, particularly in ballet.  I felt the film was fairly well-balanced between showing t

It's rare to come across something that tries this hard and misses so spectacularly. Six Weeks is a 1982 drama about a man running for Congress who forms a deep emotional connection with a precocious, talented 12-year-old girl dying of cancer and her wealthy mother. So... not a premise you want to screw up. The movie stars Dudley Moore as Patrick, the Congressional candidate, and Mary Tyler Moore as Charlotte, the mother. Nicole, the dying kid, is played by Katherine Healy. Katherine and Dudley do good work. As for Mary Tyler Moore... let's just say she EARNS her Razzie nomination. The plot is thin, which isn't in itself a bad thing, since this is really supposed to be more about tone than story. Unfortunately, it screws that up, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's expand on the premise. Nicole's a talented dancer who dreams of performing in the Nutcracker, but she worries how her mother will react to her death. She also wants to know what it's like to ha

Just as a number of Hollywood productions with 2020 release dates got pushed to streaming, quite a few foreign films intended for theaters were picked up by streaming services hoping to expand their customer base internationally. A side effect of this is a number of movies that would otherwise never have seen US releases are readily available, offering a glimpse into how other countries view Christmas media. In this case, that apparently boils down to a fairly by-the-numbers knock-off of English language holiday fare. De Familie Claus (I'll call it "The Claus Family" going forward, since the title isn't getting mangled) is a live-action Dutch language kid's fantasy/dramedy from Belgium about a kid discovering he's the secret heir to the Santa dynasty. If that sounds like Arthur Christmas, you're both right and wrong: there's a hall of Santas set more or less directly lifted from that movie, but they've otherwise deviated from the formula, particula

A Christmas to Fight For Jessica Frances, 2021 New Release! A copy of this book was provided by Netgalley for the purpose of review. I was amused enough by the premise of this book to request a copy for review: a romance between a krampus and a Santa Claus (both appear to be magical races in this world).  And on reading it, I was amused by the book and overall enjoyed it, but I need to address a couple problems.  First, the author advertises the fact that the book was professionally edited, but the book needs another edit. Or better editors. The copy I read had enough typos and mistakes in the beginning that I almost stopped reading (and likely would have were I not planning to review it for this site). Missing words, incorrect verb tenses, and awkward phrases all abound early on. The errors drop off at some point, although they did appear occasionally all the way to the end. I did get this from Netgalley - maybe this copy wasn't final? However, the file didn't say advance or u

I held off on this one when it came out last year, because I didn't want to contribute anything towards salvaging Mel Gibson's career. He's had more chances than damn near anyone, and he doesn't deserve another. At the same time, this is a bizarre spin on Santa, so I felt like I had to get to it eventually. And of course, I was incredibly curious. If you missed the trailers, Fatman is a dark comedy-action-drama-superhero movie about an aging Santa and Mrs. Claus trying to keep their Alaskan factory afloat through difficult times, and also Santa's being hunted by a sociopathic hitman hired by a kid seeking revenge over a lump of coal. So, yeah, that at least sounds like something I'd be interested in. The problem for me is the movie works so hard doing all that competently, it doesn't actually get around to justifying the premise in the first place. In other words, this movie is fine but ultimately forgettable, which is kind of a major failing in a premise th

I hadn't intended to spend anywhere near this much time on "Slasher Santa" movies this year. As I mentioned in my top 5 list , I'm way outside my wheelhouse here - I typically dislike slasher movies, and my background in horror remains relatively limited. I only put the list together after being surprised by the number of movies in (or at least adjacent to) the genre I considered good enough to warrant recommending. And while I'd originally intended to just sort of "wing it," I ultimately found myself re-watching everything on the list to confirm my rankings. In the process of going through all that, I wound up with a few observations I couldn't fit in the introduction. In particular, I noticed that every one of these movies in some way incorporated two related themes: identity and the dual nature of Santa Claus. Actually, back up a minute. Every one of these except for Santa Jaws. But Santa Jaws is really more a parody of this trope than an example