Show and Sell

A harried mom drops her Christmas preparations to watch holiday-themed television nonstop, and learns the joys of bonding and buying

"YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS," I told my 12-year-old, beckoning her over to my laptop to look at a Web site I'd found called Xmasdvd.com, replete with links to Christmas television specials. Scrolling through various clips, I'd come across the old Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song, which I listened to endlessly while growing up in the 1960s. The song was featured in several animated TV specials, and here, thanks to the Internet, was one of them.

"I loved this as a kid," I told Anna, who settled in expectantly as the link took us to a YouTube clip. Here --yes! -- was that opening riff with its relentless, seasick-y rhythm; here was Dave, the trio's perennially exasperated manager, calling over and over for Alvin; here was Alvin shouting "Okay!" and joining Theodore and Simon at the microphone. Here was holiday entertainment as I remembered it, until, all at once, here was something I didn't remember at all.

"$$##!!% you, Dave!" Alvin said, stopping in mid-song and unleashing a string of profanity that I thought I must be misunderstanding. "I've been singing the same **!!#$$ Christmas song with these ##@@* chuckleheads for over 50 *@$$ years," Alvin continued, finishing with an invitation to Dave to . . . well, look it up if you want. My daughter sat dumbfounded, as stunned as if Santa Claus had come down the chimney escorted by a pair of waitresses from Hooters. "This? This is what you used to watch at Christmas?" Anna asked wanly, and I explained that, no, this was what you call a latter-day parody.

And that's when it dawned on me that something had happened to Christmas television. It had changed. It had grown up. It had been altered and YouTubed. It had been rethought and revised and digitally remastered. Something had happened to Christmas television when I wasn't watching.

OF COURSE I WASN'T WATCHING. I have a job and a family. It's amazing to me that anybody has time for television at Christmas, which is precisely the season when I am least likely to have 30 seconds to watch a Santa sleigh-ride on a Norelco razor, much less the leisure to enjoy an hour-long home-for-the-holidays special with Sheryl Crow and Reba McEntire. It's true that the gods of programming provide plenty of opportunity: Christmas TV now starts around Thanksgiving and ends well after New Year's Day, swelling and snowballing until every day seems to offer a marathon of Will Ferrell and the voice of Tom Hanks exhorting children, everywhere, to keep believing in Santa.

"We always say, 'Don't let Christmas end on Christmas Day!'" explains Pam Slay, a vice president for publicity at the Hallmark Channel, which offers holiday movies all the way to the middle of January.

Naturally, other stations are scrambling to keep up. Lifetime offers 25 days of prime-time holiday-themed movies, which is not to be confused with ABC Family's "25 days of Christmas." PBS has the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a documentary about the winter world of Yellowstone, among others; many series do holiday episodes; and the networks have mixed a potpourri that includes the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, dubious inclusions such as the "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show," and an ABC Shrek special. From a handful of staples, Christmas has become a blowout, 24/7 extravaganza. But the more it grows, the less I am able to watch it, because the expansion of the Christmas TV season means the expansion of the Christmas TV commercial season, which means the expansion of the shopping season, which means the expansion of the season, period, which imposes its massive obligations on top of the other regular duties that make up my life.

I think this inability to savor Christmas programming may be truer of women than of men, who -- I think this is fair to say -- do not seem quite as oppressed by Christmas chores. Even in the most egalitarian households, it is usually the female who does the bulk of the shopping, wrapping, card-sending, cookie-baking, planning and list-making, all while trying to finish, by December 24, the endless task of buying gifts for relatives, neighbors, friends, babysitters and teachers, plus extras in case someone gets forgotten. "Christmas is labor!" I am prone to complain as I stand boxing, wrapping and looking for tape.

And so, I decided to do some catching up. The Chipmunk-viewing was part of a project to sit down, as the rest of the world seems able to do, and saturate myself with so much Christmas programming, commercials, made-for-TV movies and recycled showings of theatrical Christmas releases that I would become imbued with holiday spirit, which, as you may have surmised, is not something I overflow with. Oh, I like Christmas perfectly well; the lights are lovely, and the trees, and the music and the Christmas story. But what I really like is spring break at the beach. Christmas is an exponential escalation of what mothers do all the time anyway: try to make other people happy.

This year, though, I would watch and watch until my heart grew three sizes that day, and my family, perhaps, would sit down and watch with me. Because, if memory serves, that's what Christmas television specials are about, aren't they? About coming together, as Jimmy Stewart does with family and friends at the end of "It's

a Wonderful Life," and realizing how lucky

you are to be alive and how happy you are to