DAY 14: I CAN'T FEEL MY EYES ANYMORE!

HA HA… That guy's name is Mailhouse!

All right Hallmark, I get it already! Small towns are wonderful places of light and warmth, big cities are evil vortexes of soul-sucking darkness! Folks from Beaver Lick, Montana are the salt of the Earth and people from Manhattan are rim-riding anal jockeys! Yes, I understand now, the heathen way city slickers celebrate the season by giving thoughtless presents like gift cards for Subway and the Apple Store to friends they only know through Facebook can't compare to the simple joy of getting a plate of warm gingerbread cookies from someone you've known all your life, like Mrs. Dunklenuts from up the road. (Losing you virginity to Mrs. Dunklenuts' over-developed daughter Cindy down in the root cellar when you were both 16 was also a nice thing.) That's how the holidays are supposed to be. Thank you Hallmark for hitting me over the head with this message and teaching me this lesson over and over and over lo these last couple of weeks!

Day 14's holiday waterboarding session was The Christmas Pageant starring Melissa Gilbert. I noticed during the opening credits that this one was produced by Larry Levinson, that name might not be familiar to you but it sure is to me as he produces a lot of Hallmark Channel stuff and has had a brilliant career at making me sad. Anyway, Gilbert stars as Vera Parks (but she'll always be Half-Pint to me) a big time theater director from that bastion of bright lights and fornication that is New York City. Vera finds herself out of a job for the first time in a long career of pissing off showbiz folk and no one in town will even hire her to direct traffic. Except there is one offer, to direct the annual Christmas pageant in a small town in upstate New York. Of course she takes the gig. It was either that or lower herself to directing porn… and you know how I would've voted.

At this point I'm going to just save myself some time and direct you to go back to DAY 3 and read what I said about that movie, Farewell Mr. Kringle, because it's pretty much the same film. Big city girl in a small town, all attitude and snooty, spends some time there, learns their quaint ways, falls in love, leaves the city behind and becomes a Stepford Wife.

In-between all that there's attempts at physical comedy that are uncomfortable to watch. Vera uses a hand mixer to make cookies at the town's annual baking party and… oh no, she's an idiot, batter flies everywhere and hilarity ensues. There are attempts at warmth like the townspeople letting Vera have the honor of lighting the tree at the annual tree-lighting ceremony. Come to think of it, this town has an assload of annual crap happening. Springtime must be a hoot when they get to the annual mating rituals. The movie just tries too hard to stuff too many elements into 90-minutes of screen time. The town bitch reveals she's in the midst of a cancer scare, we're then given 30 seconds to live with that before she gets the phone call saying she's A-OK and suddenly she's the nicest person around. The shyest girl in town turns out to have an opera quality voice but refuses to sing in the pageant because of stage fright. "I'm sorry, I… I just can't sing in… oh all right, I'll do it!" That was in real-time, people, it happened that fast. One minute she's a scared little bitch, next minute she's a diva making the townspeople weep with her voice. And the love story between Gilbert and the leading man must have happened during the commercial breaks, because I don't even remember seeing it.

I am going to have to go on record though and say that Melissa Gilbert has a nice rack. Pretty much the only positive I took away from this movie. Everything else was simply dreck. Is it wrong that right after I watched this I caught this week's episode of American Horror Story and felt a lot better? That can't be normal, can it? Small town values and Christmas cheer have me running for the exits but haunted houses and demon pregnancies make me feel comfortable and safe? Yeah, I should probably see someone about that. Like a therapist or a priest… or a prostitute. Hey, whatever it takes, that's how we do things in the city. So suck it, Hallmark!