DAY 6: OKAY… THAT HURT.

That house in the background doesn't even appear in this film.
That's just how much of a shit the produces refused to give.

"The intelligent warrior knows that retreat and failure are separate entities. But the wise warrior knows when to use the former to avoid the latter." 

~ General Tso Tsung-tang

So if I'm to take those sage words to heart then there would be no shame in my game if I cut my losses right now and just dropped this foolishness I've gotten myself into. Hasn't been all that bad up to this point, but last night… last night was a bad one, worst one yet. And only Day 6, eighteen more to go and the risk of catching something even more horrific looms pretty large. Smart thing to do might just be to cut bait and spend the rest of the month catching up on a good book or finally get around to cataloging my own DNA.

But with all due respect to the good General, I am not a wise warrior and I have no idea when to quit. No idea how to drive stick either, but that's not really relevant at this time. So sorry Mom and Dad, apparently you did raise a dummy. (Right, like they needed me to tell them that.) Besides, what am I gonna do, heed that bullshit quote up there? Not even real, made it up on the fly and attributed it to a Chinese chicken dish. Yeah, THAT General Tso. 

Well, seeing as I'm too stupid to give up — and also saddled with a hankering for Chinese take-out right about now — might as well get down to business.

Lucky Christmas was the selection of the day and in a word: God awful in a way that makes you question whether evolution was even worth the trouble of climbing out of the ooze if this is the best we can do in the name of holiday entertainment. Okay, maybe that's a little more than a word. Perhaps should have been hyphenated.

Elizabeth Berkley, she of Saved by the Bell and Showgirls fame (there's a range) stars as Holly (subtle) a working single mother who buys a ticket in the Michigan Christmas Lottery. (F@%K MICHIGAN! GO BUCKEYES!) Sorry, that's sort of automatic with me now. Holly plays the same numbers she's been playing for years, gives the ticket a kiss for luck (marking it with her red lipstick to make it sexy) and tosses it into the glove box of her car. Then the car gets stolen by a pair of idiots. The next morning when Holly sees that her numbers hit, she's devastated because she only has until midnight on Christmas Eve to get the ticket and cash it in or she loses the million dollar prize. The local news broadcasts Holly's tragic tale of woe and when the idiot car thieves realize what they've done they hatch a scheme to get the ticket back to Holly without getting themselves arrested for boosting her ride and perhaps score a reward in the process. What happens from that moment on is supposed to be what's known as a comedy of errors, except it runs pretty light on the comedy and really heavy on the errors. Where I come from we had a name for that… Three's Company. (Bah dum bum!)

Holly and the better looking of the thieves fall in love (of course) but please don't ask me how because I'm not really sure myself. One minute they're meeting at an ice skating rink, next thing you know they're having feelings for each other. Same thing with Holly's kid and his problem with the school bully. One minute they're predator and prey, then there's an event at an ice skating rink and (POOF!) they're best friends enjoying sleepovers together. We need to put ice rinks in the Gaza Strip immediately! Bringing peace to the Middle-East, just how I do.

Cliff Notes time!

There's deceit — Holly has no idea her new boyfriend is the car thief. There's betrayal — She eventually finds out and gets pissed. There's misunderstanding — He wanted to tell her and had tried to mail the lottery ticket back to her but it's been misplaced. There's sadness — Because everyone is sad, there's even a montage… of sad. There's discovery — Holly finds the ticket stuck to the bottom of her kid's shoe (little bastard). There's forgiveness — With just minutes to go until the deadline, Holly races to find Mike (Oh yeah, that's car thief/boyfriend's name BTW.) to tell him that she found the ticket and that she forgives him and loves him. She does this first instead of you know, going straight to the lottery office and getting paid! But this made it more special because then they race to get the money together, hand-in hand, laughing all the way (HA HA HA). More romantic imagery is heaped on when they get to the lottery office (Open until midnight on Christmas Eve? WTF?) with scant moments to spare and before they go in, there in the falling snow, Mike sealed the deal by invading Holly's talk-hole with his saliva stick and wasted even more of the time they didn't really have! Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. After that it fades to black and they're never actually shown getting the money, so I like to imagine that the doors were locked, they were shit out of luck, stayed poor losers for the rest of their miserable lives and eventually parted ways in anger. Not really a happy ending for them, but it works for me because they're from Michigan so eff them hard! YEAH I SAID IT! GO BUCKEYES!

On the plus side, there wasn't the usual holiday death in this one. No one was bitter or lonely or longing for someone they'd lost. No one died in this movie at all. Although several mentions were made of Mike's father being sick so I thought that phone call might've been coming at any time. Also, the kindly old couple Holly rented her living space from sort of had the stink of death lingering around them. But nope, they survived to see the closing credits as well. So Hallmark broke with tradition on that front. Not that it helped.

I realize that what I've done counts as spoilers and I didn't give any warning of any kind. But I don't feel bad about that. I wish someone had done the same for me and spared me this painful ordeal. At one point it got so bad I think I blacked out and had an out of body experience. My consciousness took flight and drifted away…only to wind up in the body of another person who happened to be watching the same movie. So that didn't help at all. I think it was a woman, from the South, with big cans and I remember smelling bacon and tasting mayonnaise and butter… Oh my God, I think I was inside Paula Deen!

And with those words did I crack the Seventh Seal and usher in the apocalypse. Sorry about that, Earth.