Show and Sell

Good news, though: There is a cable channel that caters to our predicament. This would be Lifetime, which, according to senior vice president Tanya Lopez, targets women from ages 18 to 49. And Lifetime knows under what circumstances we'll be watching: while we're creating the holiday. "There's a lot of women that are doing their cooking, filling out their holiday cards, wrapping gifts; they're using the movie to be on as sort of comfort food," says Lopez, who suspects that women watch while "they're multitasking." And, for them, she says, Lifetime has prepared entertainment designed to "make me feel good right now. I don't want anything that makes me feel anxious."

I found that hard to believe when I watched two original Lifetime movies premiering this year: a drearier set of domestic predicaments you would be hard-pressed to find, even in Bedford Falls. One, "Holiday Switch," opens with a wife criticizing her husband, who is easy-going and loving to their children but doesn't earn enough money to give them much of a holiday. Depressed, the wife goes into the basement to do laundry, and hears voices -- don't you hate it when this happens? -- coming out of the dryer. Naturally, she crawls inside to investigate, and falls out the other side, into the laundry room and life that she would have had, if she'd married the rich guy she dated in high school. And guess what? Life with him would have sucked! Despite the pedicures! She manages to get back into the dryer, tumbles back into her own basement and, also George Bailey-like, learns to value the husband who comes to pick her up off the floor.

The other Lifetime movie I watched was "Lost Holiday," which made me want to put my head into the gas oven along with the holiday cookies. In this one, we are presented with a couple whose bickering is Olympic-caliber: Jim and Suzanne Shemwell (Dylan Walsh and Jami Gertz), estranged but not divorced, who take an afternoon just before Christmas to go snowmobiling in the Idaho mountains. Suzanne is the most controlling, most obsessively list-making mother you have ever met. When the two get lost in, yes, a blizzard, she berates her husband ceaselessly, going so far as to criticize the way he used to diaper their children, and he keeps talking about what a control freak she has always been. You want both of them to get buried in an avalanche. "Why is she doing so much shouting?" asked my husband, who is definitely not among the target demographic.

But they are saved when the community fans out to look for them, at massive expense, and their marriage is saved, as well. Over and over, the message of made-for-TV Christmas movies is that estranged family members can reconcile if only they'd show a little understanding, agree to change their personal behavior, maybe go out into a blizzard.

Or send a card. The theme of family reconciliation is perhaps most deeply ingrained in the movies made for the Hallmark Channel, which are many. "The Hallmark brand is associated with the holidays, and just about the biggest is Christmas," says David Kenin, executive vice president of programming at Hallmark, who was happy to talk about the network's extensive Christmas programming. According to Kenin, Hallmark's target demographic is broadly conceived. "Our holiday movies tend to be something a kid and their parents can both watch." And it's true, my daughter, Anna -- a spiritual if not chronological millennial who has every member of our family on speed-dial -- particularly enjoyed "A Grandpa for Christmas," in which a grandfather played by Ernest Borgnine reconciles with his family, thanks to the efforts of the plucky young heroine. (The mom in that movie is pretty sour, too.)

And there is nothing wrong with reconciliation. But what is striking is how well the medium meshes with the commercial message: It's hard to ignore the number of Hallmark movies in which reconciliation occurs when . . . somebody sends a card or a letter. Last year's most popular Hallmark movie, "The Christmas Card," features an American soldier in Afghanistan who receives a card from a young woman who sends it as part of a church project. The card sustains him, and, when he is on leave, he searches for her. He reaches her just in time to save her from marrying an unctuous, anti-family boyfriend; bonds with her dad, played by Ed Asner; and clearly will marry her and take over the family business. It's amazing, what happens when you make the effort to get out those holiday cards!

Similarly, one of this year's offerings, "The Note," begins when a plane plunges into water and, before it crashes, a passenger dashes off a note of forgiveness that later washes up on shore, tucked into a plastic bag containing Christmas cookie crumbs. A newspaper columnist, played by Genie Francis of "General Hospital" fame, discovers it and writes about her quest to find the intended recipient. Her readers are mesmerized, and soon everybody starts reconciling, sending letters, making calls, texting their parents, and, in the end, even the heroine is reconciled to someone she thought she'd lost forever. So get writing!

To be sure, television has always been embedded with commercial messages. But at Christmas, the commercialism reaches a new level of mutual reinforcement. During the rest of the year, Robert Thompson points out, TV commercials come as an interruption, but at Christmas, even the images -- trees, snowmen and, of course, gifts -- are the same. Sometimes the two are deliberately blended. This year, ABC Family has created an animated elf who will appear at the bottom of the screen during the program. During the commercial break, the elf will go full screen and, for example, prepare Betty Crocker sugar cookies. The advertisement is part of the program, and the program is part of the advertisement. The technique is called "integration." According to Paul Lee, advertisers are lining up to buy elf sponsorship. It's like the old days, when, say, George Burns and Gracie Allen praised Carnation milk on the show. We've come full circle, Lee agrees.

Everywhere, the same themes are omni-present whether it be show or advertisement: family coming together on the couch to watch a high-definition DVD player. Martha Stewart directing a project to decorate all of Macy's, herding a group of celebrity helpers. Watching, I thought: Well, great, even the commercials are giving us the bossy uber-female. I thought again how nice it would be to see even one woman whose efforts to "create the holiday" are appreciated. It's as though the season has turned us into compulsive list-makers, only to make fun of us for it. This didn't surprise Ellen Galinsky. The media, she says, have always been "fairly uncharitable" to mothers.

AND THE THING IS: WHO, REALLY, IS OPPRESSING WHOM? After stumbling upon the doctored Chipmunks special, I thought it was funny, and watched it again. Okay, I watched it several times and e-mailed a link to friends and editors ("You e-mailed it to your editors?" my daughter asked, incredulous). My son, who happened to hear parts of it, was shocked to see his mother watching a video that showcases the f-word. "Mom, I'm concerned about you," he said. (The whole project concerned him: He had a hard time believing this is what grown-ups call "working.") It got so that whenever he saw me with the laptop, he would come over to make sure I wasn't watching the Chipmunks. So who is tyrannizing whom at Christmas? I had to go to the attic, finally, to watch it.

And it was in the attic that I watched "South Park" Christmas episodes, which, like the Chipmunks on YouTube, are a cynical take on boomer sensibilities, a postmodern revision of Christmas television. They appeal to a generation that has experienced the Big Four mostly through DVD -- an on-demand generation, which never has to wait for anything, the generation that doesn't need Christmas presents because whatever it is you're thinking about getting them, they've already got it.

The "South Park" specials are knowing, ironic, profane, scatological and terrific, something I had heard but never experienced firsthand, because I had always been afraid to watch "South Park" with kids in the house. I found the solution by borrowing my kids' ear buds and plugging them into my laptop, so they couldn't hear dialogue searing enough to burn your hair off.

And now that I was a student of the Christmas canon, the first thing I noticed about the "South Park" animations is how referential they are to their forebears. One episode opens with "South Park" kids performing, yes, a Christmas play, and the Stan character is reciting, yes, the Nativity story, and Kyle is feeling, yes, depressed and alienated. He is alienated because he is Jewish, and his mother has just charged in objecting to the Christmas play, and things get worse when he starts talking to a piece of singing feces called Mr. Hankey and his friends commit him to an insane asylum. It took me awhile to see the appeal of Mr. Hankey, whose message is one of universal fellowship, but who is maybe just too adolescent for a 40-something to see the hilarity of. Still, the satire is brilliant; there is a scene where, in a frenzy of political correctness, "South Park" citizens take issue with the most mundane religious references -- somebody insists the Christmas lights be taken down, as offensive to people with epilepsy -- but nobody objects to a sexualized Christmas song. It's a smart commentary on the things we find offensive and the things we don't but should.

Brilliant, too, is "The Spirit of Christmas," a five-minute short, too profane even for cable, that was made as a video Christmas card and, after being seen by Comedy Central programmers, led to the "South Park" series. After fake credits that make a sly nod to "Krankin Blass," the video (available on YouTube) opens with the kids insulting each other with a savagery that makes the "Peanuts" kids look like a trust therapy group. Then Jesus floats down and tells them he is here for retribution. "He's come to kill you because you're Jewish, Kyle!" one kid says. But it is Santa Claus whom Jesus is after, for besmirching the meaning of Christmas, and when the two meet they have a battle, and the kids cannot decide whom to root for. One kid says, "Jesus, you have to understand that Santa is keeping the spirit of your birthday alive by bringing happiness and joy." And another points out, "Santa, you need to remember that if it weren't for Jesus, this day wouldn't even exist." Watching, I thought: That's a surprisingly good compromise answer to the question of whether the holiday is about commercialism or spiritualism, money or faith, presents or belief, Santa or Jesus. Like the gifts of the Three Wise Men, presents embody the love of one human being for another. In short -- of course -- it's about both.

AND SO I LEARNED SOMETHING, READER, FROM MY LONG HOURS IN FRONT OF THE TELEVISION. I learned that today the holidays are about presents, and not buying presents, about needing money, and learning that money can't buy you love. The holidays are about treasuring your family and feeling you can't stand being around them for another minute. I learned that the way families are portrayed on Christmas television is a reflection of the era: The boomers gave us Rudolph and Donner; the millennials gave us an adult daughter, in "The Christmas Card," so ludicrously bonded to her mother that she breathlessly tells her, "Mom, I kissed Cody!"

In a way, sitting down and watching all these shows was my own flirtation with a George Bailey-like fantasy life. What would Christmas be like if I didn't have all these holiday chores and obligations? What if I didn't have to buy a thousand presents between now and December 24? What if I didn't have to cook Christmas meals and grocery-shop for them first? What if there were nobody depending on me at Christmas? What if I really did have the luxury of being able to sit down and watch television during the holidays? Or even just sit down? This fantasy, or one like it, is not uncommon among mothers. One I know has what she calls the "coma" fantasy, in which she gets lots of sleep in a hospital bed and can't hear the demands of her family and wakes up one day, rested and refreshed. Another has the "hit by a bus" fantasy, in which she steps off a curb and is grazed just enough to break her ankle, so she can spend weeks in bed, chatting on the phone with her girlfriends.

If my life were actually a Christmas movie on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel, this sitting-on-the-couch fantasy would be revealed as unworkable and stale. I would get up from the TV newly aware that lots of free time at the holidays would be empty and meaningless. I would feel ready to crawl back through the clothes dryer into my own world and to start creating that holiday. And it was true: I certainly did feel ready to stop watching, in part because, in this age of demographic fragmentation, watching was getting lonely. I missed my family. Mostly, though, I felt vaguely panicked; the holidays were only weeks away, and nothing had been done. It was time to start planning menus, making lists, buying big presents, buying little presents, addressing envelopes, stringing garlands, hanging wreaths. The one thing I wouldn't be doing between now and Christmas was watching television.

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at mundyl@washpost.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.