The Long Holiday
Christmastime is (Finally, Actually) Here
Deck Them is a weekly newsletter exploring the Hallmark Channel’s 15th annual Countdown to Christmas ⭐ Share the joy ⭐
If you can believe it, it’s December once again. We’ve put the lights on the tree and the stockings are hung by the chimney with care and only seven movies are left in the Hallmark Channel’s 15th annual Countdown to Christmas. But, don’t let it get you down! We have a holiday special for you.
Deck Them presents… Under the Mistletoe! This Sunday, December 8, we’re playing an all-vinyl set of ultimate love songs and holiday disco pulled from the Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s archive for their monthly Puppetphonic series. Come groove with us live outside the theater windows in Highland Park or tune into Dublab at 11:00 a.m. Pacific.
While the Countdown to Christmas packed the long holiday weekend with seven premieres, Hallmark kicked off its Christmas Experience, an immersive event with exclusive access to Hallmark stars and artists and the charm of a Hallmark movie town square—all these things and more.
This Countdown, more traditional films like Debbie Macomber’s Joyful Mrs. Miracle1, Deck the Walls2, and Believe in Christmas have struggled to commit themselves to memory. The trend towards Holiday Hijinks and High-Concept Christmas Capers, overwhelmingly, continues.
Hallmark has simplified the process for Christmas Caroling their Scrooges, removing the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Yet to Come entirely, and replacing the Ghost of Christmas Past with literal time travel and magical transit operators. We saw this in 2021’s Next Stop, Christmas when Christopher Lloyd conducted a decade-spanning holiday train and again last Friday when A ’90s Christmas’ Hot Scrooge was sent back to 1999 with the help of an enchanted Uber. Hot Scrooge is de-aged with clip-on bangs and promises to honor Christmas in her heart and try to keep it all the year.
Our Holiday Giant seldom diverts from the two-lead structure. While there can be, say, a cast of characters—their footing is never equal. Ed Begley Jr. (star of Meet the Applegates), Megyn Price (who was in Bumblebee with Hailee Steinfeld who is engaged to Josh Allen3 who made NFL history on Sunday becoming only the fourth player to throw a touchdown pass to himself, the first quarterback since 1970 to have passing, receiving, and rushing touchdowns in the same game, and just the second player in NFL history to record at least two passing touchdowns, one rushing touchdown, and one receiving touchdown in the same game), Diedrich Bader (The Drew Carey Show), Christine Bersol (Mac & Me), and Richard Riehle (Rob Zombie’s Halloween II), join Tyler Hynes and Hunter King in Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, as a family with a magic Christmas hat competing for the Kansas City Chiefs Fan of the Year Award. Do you think Taylor Swift saw this one? After the lights went down on rehearsals—returning to her trailer, alone. Wait, no, Travis Kelce is there. He’s always with her. He’s on every screen, every thirty minutes in advertisements for Campbell Soup, DIRECTV, General Mills, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Statefarm, and Subway that have aired over 95,510 times in the past thirty days. Kelce does not appear in Holiday Touchdown, but his mom does.
The Christmas Quest4 is a rarity. Both Destination: Christmas and High-Concept Christmas Caper, Lacey Chabert’s Icelandic adventure is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the holidays. When Our Queen discovers the meaning of Christmas (potatoes), we believe her.
These movies are the echoes of stories we used to tell.
Brought to you by California Romanza
Sometimes, you want to stay in a moment, let holiday sentiment wash over you, feel a frosty kiss on your cheek in the quiet light of the Christmas Tree.
There are a few ways to approach your holiday reading. Are you looking for always winter or only Christmas? Chaste and rightly pure or straight-up smut? Would you like a romance set during Christmastime in Victorian London or on a fantasy planet with icy blue aliens? The choice is yours. These holiday romances offer a touch of fantasy, a dash of pleasure, and just a few shenanigans
The Christmas Cat includes stories by Julie Beard, Jo Beverly, Barbara Bretton, and Lynn Kurland connected by a singular, tenuous premise: a cat leads two people to find love at Christmastime. A Christmas Romance anthology is strange enough, and with cats playing Cupid across subgenres it becomes stranger altogether. For anyone wishing their Christmas Ghosts were feline, we recommend keeping catnip in your sleeping robe.
A Season for Love is a collection of Lisa Kleypas’ novels set in the winter, A Wallflower Christmas and Mine Till Midnight. The queen of historical romance, Kleypas novels are actual novels—not just cheap cash grabs at holiday-themed anything. And Mine Till Midnight is the greatest gift of all.
The Cowboy Cookie Challenge by Lori Wilde should receive an award for the most Countdown to Christmas-like book ever to exist. It has everything:
A highly competitive cookie competition with increasingly strange rules (live fire baking, anyone?)
A plucky heroine down on her luck slowly learning to stand up for herself
A Widower Cowboy celebrity chef (yes!), the only one who can help our heroine
A precocious child
See also: His Mistress by Christmas by Victoria Alexander, and One Snowy Knight by Deborah MacGillivray.
Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon is the sensation that made and broke Booktok. When a group of human women abducted by slave-selling aliens crash land on a frosty ice planet, they find salvation in a group of beefy blue alien natives, who conveniently are all very sweet, a touch barbaric, interestingly… endowed, and looking for love. In a land that’s always frozen, the women survive by accepting a parasite that “mates” or matches with the corresponding parasite in an ice barbarian. Ah, true love never smelled so sweet.
See also: Whiteout by Adriana Anders, and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.
There is precious little more we could want. But there is more that you could want and we always recommend a book or many, many books. We recommend gifting yourself a mystery box of romance books. Ask for yours to include holiday-themed romance and beautiful step-backs. You won’t be disappointed.
Pick up a book. Sit and enjoy a while, as lovers do.
The Countdown to Christmas continues with Private Princess Christmas on Friday, Sugarplummed on Saturday, and Leah’s Perfect Gift on Sunday. All times 8/7c.
We don’t know if there’ll be snow, but our readers had their cups of cheer this week: a glowing wintry cocktail in Pasadena, a damn fine hot toddy in Seattle, and crisp sour ales in Eagle Rock. It’s the best time of the year.
Send us photos of your hot cocoa (or cider or wine or spirits or!) (just tag @tidbits.la on Instagram), and we’ll feature them in the next newsletter.
While Rachel Boston is charming as Mrs. Miracle, she deserves better than teaching the greeting card Roy Family the meaning of Christmas.
Let it be known that Wes Brown is a first-ballot Hallmark Hall of Famer.
Go Bills!
The Icelandic Yule Lads will reward anyone intending to rewatch Coyote Creek Christmas.
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