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Deconstructing some Hallmarks of the season

By Ed Goldman

It’s that magical time of the year once again when some of the worst imaginable TV movies are beamed, streamed and dreamed into your den, laptop, Apple Watch or indigestion-provoked nightmares. Here’s a sneak preview of the Hallmark Holiday Horrors awaiting us:

– THE TOWN THAT IMPEACHED SANTA CLAUS. An officious bureaucrat in the bucolic berg of Pillow Corners wonders why Santa Claus holds such sway over the electorate. He organizes a recall movement to depose Claus as the reigning spirit of the Christmas season. Then he meets an earnest young female lobbyist who insists that Santa is just what the people want: a rosy-faced fat guy who makes promises he can’t possibly keep. The bureaucrat, sensitive to the lobbyist’s panache and acute knowledge of the Kama Sutra, relents and abandons his campaign. In a delightful epilogue, the Mormon Tabernacle performs Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”

– OUR BODIES, OUR ELVES. A feminist author, a motivational speaker and a despondent rabbi walk into a bar and—Wait. That’s another film. Actually, more of an updated old joke than a film. This holiday movie is about a union organizer at the North Pole who gets the little toy makers to rise up against  their evil overlord, a rosy-faced fat guy who makes promises he can’t possibly keep. In the inspiring conclusion, the elves exile their boss to icy Greenland or greenish Iceland, whichever their sleigh-mounted GPS suggests.

– THE GIFT OF THE MAYTAG. This delightful update of the O. Henry classic short story—in which a young husband sells his watch to buy his bride expensive  combs for the long hair she has lopped off to buy him a beautiful chain for his watch—tells pretty much the same story. But this time, the young woman is a bi-curious refrigeration consultant and her beloved is a lookalike of the late Monty Hall, the longtime host of “Let’s Make a Deal.” They fall in love and for their first Christmas, the consultant gives up her consulting business so she can spend more time with Monty (to figure out her identity, orientation and wardrobe) while Monty has his staff break his refrigerator to give the consultant some work. In a heart-warming epilogue, the Norman Luboff Castrato Choir sings “Where is Love?” from the musical “Oliver!”

– YOU’D BETTER NOT ZOUT. A jealous husband warns his wife to not remove a cookie stain from her Christmas sweater which, he suspects, was the result of her rendezvous with a rosy-faced fat guy who makes promises he can’t possibly keep. Watch for a cameo by Wally Amos as the ghost of cookies past.

– RUDOLPH, THE WELL-READ REINDEER. More of an educational film than a holiday entertainment—whose failure will be dissected in a subsequent TV documentary, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Ratings”—this show features Rudolph reading some of  Kafka’s short stories to his fellow reindeer. Whenever he sees one of them begin to nod off he shines his nose in their direction. (Note: May prove too intense for perps who recently underwent a police interrogation.)

– FROSTY: THE SNOW JOB. Admitting he isn’t really made of snow, just papier-mâché, Frosty joins a therapy group for mythical creatures with abandonment issues. It includes the Easter Bunny, Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin, Cupid, Bigfoot and Rudy Giuliani. 

– THE HANUKKAH HARMONICA. This coming-of-age tale is about a depressed rabbi (played by Larry David) who misses hearing his father play cowboy songs on his Hohner Marine Band Crossover harmonica. “A crossover harmonica was the perfect thing to play when he knew he was going to—well, cross over.” As he desperately searches through his father’s belongings to find the harmonica, who should walk in the door, mistake him for a burglar and shoot him? His father! “But Dad,” the rabbi gasps as he lies in his father’s arms waiting for an ambulance, “you left a note last week saying you were going to ‘cross over’ to be with my mom, I thought you meant you were going to die and join her.” 

“Oh, my son, my son, you are such an unmitigated schnook,” the older man says tenderly. “I said I was going to Passover to be with your mom, who isn’t dead. “She’s not?!”“Nah, we just told you that when you were a kid to explain her absence. She left me for a crossover dancer named Mister Pickle. But now she’d like to make a fresh go if it.” 

The rabbi wipes away a tear and asks, “Why did she walk out on you?”