You knew this was gonna be the last one, didn’t you? My favorite holiday movie because the message of love, family, faith, and angels is sosososo strong and unabashedly sappy!!! I adore this movie. I think I’ve seen it at least 100 times over the years.
George Bailey has so many problems he is thinking about ending it all – and it’s Christmas! As the angels discuss George, we see his life in flashback. As George is about to jump from a bridge, he ends up rescuing his guardian angel, Clarence – who then shows George what his town would have looked like if it hadn’t been for all his good deeds over the years.
When Charlie Brown complains about the overwhelming materialism that he sees amongst everyone during the Christmas season, Lucy suggests that he become director of the school Christmas pageant. Charlie Brown accepts, but is a frustrating struggle. When an attempt to restore the proper spirit with a forlorn little fir Christmas tree fails, he needs Linus’ help to learn the meaning of Christmas.
When I was 8 years old my favorite present from Santa that year was a Webster’s Dictionary. Yeah. I know. I was that kind of kid, but let me run with this thought, okay?
So.
Dictionaries aside, BOOKS have always– and will always–be my favorite holiday present.
The year I got six brand new Trixie Beldon books I didn’t come out of my room for weeks on end.
The year Santa left the first four Nancy Drew Mysteries, I pretended to be sick when vacation was over so I didn’t have to go back to school. I wanted to stay home and just keep reading. My mother didn’t agree.
The year I graduated from college I gifted myself a set of Classics that included The Jane Austen novels, Gone With The Wind, and The Great Gatsby.
Needless to say, books are my go-to gift to get and give. When my daughter was small her “toy” pile was comprised of dolls and books. The older she got, the more books she received each year.
Giving a book as a gift – whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, a cookbook or a biography, means the person receiving the gift will have innumerable hours of reading pleasure. Flowers fade after a few days. Jewelry is nice, but aside from wedding rings, do you want to wear the same piece daily? Clothing is essential but how many of us really get pleasure out of an outfit after it is worn a few times?
Books can be read, re-read, re-appreciated, and re-evaluated. And they never get old. Paper may fade, but that’s the reason we have e-readers. Books impart wisdom and knowledge. Books can make you laugh, cry, get you angry, or make you happy. And books know no age limit to be gifted. You can give a baby a book that their parents will read to him/her, or you can give a senior citizen a book.
Books as gifts: it’s a good thing for the Holidays.
And (Shameless plug coming) if you’re looking for some books to give as gifts and your gift-ee is a romance reader, give them one of mine ( or more!!!) You can find them all here: My Books
The only movie where I ever truly liked Jack Black, lol
Dumped and depressed, English rose Iris agrees to swap homes with similarly unlucky in love Californian Amanda for a much-needed break. Iris finds herself in a palatial Hollywood mansion while Amanda navigates the lanes of a picture-perfect English village. Soon enough, both lovelorn ladies bump into local lads perfect for a romantic pick-me-up.
Truly, one of my favorite movies, not to mention Holiday movies, ever.
Nine intertwined stories examine the complexities of the one emotion that connects us all: love. Among the characters explored are David (Hugh Grant), the handsome newly elected British prime minister who falls for a young junior staffer (Martine McCutcheon), Sarah (Laura Linney), a graphic designer whose devotion to her mentally ill brother complicates her love life, and Harry (Alan Rickman), a married man tempted by his attractive new secretary.
I love family movies and this is one of the best ones I’ve ever seen!
Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) wants to bring his girlfriend, Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), to meet his bohemian Connecticut family at Christmas. Straitlaced Meredith, feeling she needs backup, asks her sister Julie (Claire Danes) to come along. Hoping to win the approval of her boyfriend’s parents Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) and the rest of the family, instead Meredith succeeds only in highlighting her uptight personality and making Everett doubt his intentions.
A successful song-and-dance team become romantically involved with a sister act and team up to save the failing Vermont inn of their former commanding general.
Well, to us, they’re strange. Apparently, not to the person doing them.
Case in point: my mother was a scotch tape addict.
I know, right? So weird.
She put scotch tape on everything. EVERYTHING. Every picture in her house, every piece of so-called art on the walls. The plastic placemats on her kitchen table were scotch-taped down to the table. Unmovable. Unwashable because you couldn’t pick them up to get the food crap off them. Whenever I visited weekly, I would routinely wash the place mats with a Lysol wet-one. An entire week’s worth of food crap covered that wipe. My mother would always – always – say, “I just cleaned that this morning.”
Sure you did, Mom.
Sigh.
I had a bitch of a time getting that tape off the table after she died just so I could sell the table with the house. No one was going to buy a kitchen table with TAPED placemats. No one with any kind of home design background, anyway.
Every free-standing item, or item on the walls, possessed scotch tape. Some of it was covered in it.
I’d given her numerous photos in beautiful picture frames over the years of my daughter. The frames weren’t cheap ones, either. The photos in them were secured appropriately as you’d imagine they’d be in an expensive frame, behind glass and with at least two pieces of paper or cardboard behind the picture before the frame was secured.
Some were wall frames, complete with wire hangers to make it easy to place them. Most were desk frames, freestanding with the triangular backpiece that allowed the frame to stand on its own.
When I emptied her house , I pulled everything down off the walls and tossed whatever was on the furniture, in drawers, closets, etc, in several big Rubbermaid containers, intent on going through everything at one point.
One point came last week.
I started with the photographs.
Every frame that had hung on the wall had scotch tape securing the back of it. The frames, as I said, weren’t cheap and they had the little obnoxious closures you can only open with the blunt edge of a knife or something sharp in order to put the picture in place. The perimeter of every frame was secured shut with tape. When I removed it all and then opened the frames, she’d also taped the pictures to the blank paper or cardboard inside of it. And I mean TAPED. Underneath the picture, over it, on it. Some of the photos were ruined because I couldn’t get the tape off easily and wound up tearing them.
I moved to the frames that were freestanding.
Do I need to tell you I found the same thing? In the cases where there was that triangular piece on the back to allow the frame to stand, she’d taped it open so that when I went to fold it closed to store it, I couldn’t.
So much tape.
The weirdest place I found tape – this time it was tan masking tape – was on the counters in her small kitchen area. Apparently, there was a gap between the countertops and edge of the sink and counterboard and they didn’t fit snuggly in place, causing about a half-inch opening. Food and water would routinely drop or drip down into the gap, so my mother had the bright idea to put masking tape along the entire counter, the back wall, and along the drawers underneath. When I noticed this once when she was alive she told me she did it to prevent ants from coming in.
At the exact moment she said this I spotted two ants crawling along the backsplash wall.
I told her I would buy ant spray, spray the area, and that I’d remove the tape.
She forbade me. This exploded into a huge argument with her becoming extremely agitated and verbally abusive, telling me I didn’t live in her home and couldn’t dictate how she ran it.
I tried pointing out how dumb and unattractive it looked having masking tape along the counters. I really should have just kept my mouth shut. I realized this later when she erupted and I mean ERUPTED in a screaming hissy fit. She accused me of always looking down on her and how she lived. She stated I thought I was better than she and my stepfather were because I’d married a man with money. That was an old complaint I’d heard throughout my marriage. It never failed to hurt me.
She accused me of a various list of offenses, starting with accusing me of always hating that we were poor when I was a kid and ending with the phrase, “I should have sent you to your father to live when you were a child.”
At one point she wheeled over to where I was standing by the kitchen sink, inspecting the stained and sticky masking tape and rammed her wheelchair into my leg in an attempt to get me to move away from the offending counter.
It worked.
I left – in pain and furious -without saying goodbye, slammed out of the house and shot off in a snit.
Real mature, I know.
I was 60 at the time.
As I drove the 35 miles back to my own home I realized why she’d reacted the way she had.
All her life her family had looked down on her. On her life choices, her marriage, the fact she never learned how to drive, or traveled, or had any friends. They called her stupid, dumb, moronic. Her mother’s comments when she was alive were always cruel.
My mother interpreted my concern, incorrectly, as just another person in her life denigrating how she lived and who she was.
When this realization came to me, I felt horrible. I hadn’t meant to make her upset – I never did, but so often her inability to control her emotions just boiled over and she reacted without ever looking at a situation with logic and thought instead of hurt and the need to get back, or lash out, at the person.
Years of study as a psychiatric nurse had taught me to recognize and understand why this behavior occurred.
Decades of being her daughter and I still hadn’t learned how to help her control it.
When I got home, I called her immediately. She answered the phone in a subdued voice, fresh with tears. I apologized and tried to explain I’d meant no disrespect. She was right, I said. It was her home and she could live in it any way she wanted. As long, I added, she was safe.
After several sniffs, she thanked me, then, like a light switch being turned from off to on, like the entire emotional situation had never happened, her voice brightened and, in that singsong way she had when she was pretending to be happy, she told me that they had just eaten one of the lunches I prepared for them and that it was delicious.
I told her I was glad. She said, “My love to you all,” and then we rang off.
I took a three-hour nap after that because I was so wrung out.
Just an fyi- today’s snippet is fromINFLUENCEwhich is currently FREE on kindle until 12.19.2023. Have you read it yet? Now is the time to before the price goes up again on the 20th!
“Excuse me, Mr. Craymore,” I said. “I believe I’m next on your daughter’s next dance card.”
Sterling Craymore’s gaze raked me from head to feet, an assessing glare in his eyes and one, if I’m being truthful, meant to assure me he could cut me off at the knees if he wanted to. If I’m ever lucky enough to be a father I’m going to use that withering glare on all my daughter’s boyfriends.
“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said, removing her arm from the crook of his elbow crook and simultaneously planting a kiss on his cheek. She whispered something in his ear that had the suspicious look dissolving, to be replaced with one of pure paternal love.
I didn’t want to give her a moment to reconsider, so I stepped forward and extended my hand. “Shall we?”
Effortlessly she slid into my arms. For a brief moment, I allowed myself to simply enjoy the feel of her body close to mine. The song was a slow, jazzy ballad perfect for swaying to. Both of us, though, were too practiced as dancers to ever simply sway.
We were silent for a few moments as I glided her across the dance floor, each of us learning and concentrating on the movements of the other.
“You’ve done this before,” Mackenzie said, smiling, as I spun her to the right.
“Never underestimate the benefits of a good dance instructor.”
“Miss Davenport’s?” She asked, naming a school I knew catered to the wealthy.
“No. I took lessons in England as a boy, where I was born.”
“Why don’t you sound like your brother, then? His accent is charming.”
I lifted a brow as I stared down at her. “And mine isn’t?”
The tips of her ears went pink. “I meant,” she said, “When Charlie opens his mouth you know he’s English-born. I don’t hear a hint of anything in your voice.”
“It’s because I grew up in the States. When my parents divorced, my father wanted to come back here after being away from the country for almost a decade. He’d been running his business from England, but with the split, decided to return. Charlie got mom and I got dad in the divorce settlement.”
“That’s sad. But you two kept in touch, right?”
“Of course. He’s family. My older brother.” I grinned down at her. “Of course, he does like to laud the older part over me.” I glided her to the left. “We saw one another on most of my school holidays. The bond between us is strong.”
Her sigh drifted over me, the sound like the high register keys on a piano tinkling.
“It must be nice to have a sibling. I always wanted one, but.” She delicately lifted a shoulder.
“A blessing and a curse is what I tell people having a big brother is like.”
Her smile was like a thunderbolt and knocked me back as if I’d been struck by its force.
“So,” she asked, “how do you know Gideon?”
“I don’t. Not personally. I know of him through Nell. He’s friends with her new stepfather.”
“William McNab.”
“Yeah. When Charlie mentioned they were attending this shindig tonight, I wormed an invite.”
“Why?”
To meet you would have been an answer I’d need to explain, so I told her instead, “The cause is a worthy one and my mother raised us to support worthy causes.”
She nodded. “His clinic is wonderful. He takes in anyone, whether they can afford to pay for the top-notch care they receive, or not. One hundred percent of tonight’s proceeds from the silent auction are earmarked to continue that service.”
“Worthy and noble,” I said.
I glided her around a couple who’d stopped to speak to another pair of dancers.
“So, is this how you spend your free time, Mackenzie Craymore? Attend charity auctions? Hobnob with society movers and shakers? Have lunch with friends?”
“Dance with strange men?” she said back, making me laugh.
“Touche. I didn’t mean to sound snarky. I’d just like to get to know you better.”
That must have touched a cord. Her expression blanked a bit. “I keep busy,” she responded, noncommittally.
“Which tells me absolutely nothing.” I smiled when I said it.
“A woman likes to be a little mysterious,” she said, her lips twitching. “How about you? What do you do all day when you’re not attending charity fundraisers garbed in a five thousand dollar tuxedo?”
My brows shot up.
“I know the brand.” Her cheeks pinked a bit. Of course she did. As a professional social media influence, she must. But she didn’t tell me how she knew it.
Interesting. Her new career wasn’t a secret, not to people who knew who she was, anyway. Why hide it from me?
Since I hadn’t answered her question yet, I decided to go with my version of the truth. “I spend my days attempting to write the great American novel.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not well, lately. But it looks as if things are starting to look up. Right at this minute they are, at least.”
The implication she was the reason wasn’t lost on her. A rosy flush started at the tips of her ears and drifted down to her cheeks and jawline.
The music pulled to a stop. We didn’t. With the silent band surrounding us, we continued to move as if lazy music pushed us on. If anyone thought it odd, I didn’t care.
“How do you feel about lunch?” I asked.
She blinked a few times. “I eat it two, maybe three times a week.”
Again, I couldn’t help but smile at her dry humor. Was there anything more alluring than a beautiful, sexy woman who could make you laugh?
“Care to make one of those two or three times with me?”
A food writer who has lied about being the perfect housewife must try to cover her deception when her boss and a returning war hero invite themselves to her home for a traditional family Christmas.
Peggy Jaeger, Author 