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“Christmas on the Bayou.”
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Back in 1965, Linus stepped forward and calmed the chaos of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the classic animated special, by reciting verses from the Gospel of Luke about the birth of Jesus. “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,” he concluded.
We can only guess what Linus would be thinking today were he to sample the avalanche of Christmas-themed made-for-television movies that began rolling down on us a few weeks ago and will continue right up until the big day.
A sampling of the offerings over the next couple of weeks answers the big holiday question thus:
• Christmas means that whiny children of single mothers will soon have stepfathers, thanks to courtships that last just days.
• Christmas means that singers, especially country singers, will get a chance to try movie acting.
• Christmas means that Ed Asner will get a chance to try a Cajun accent.
• Christmas means it’s time to remind ourselves that work is bad, people who work hard are bad, and being devoted to your job is bad. Though good luck paying for all the Christmas presents, Christmas decorations and Christmas travel depicted in these movies once you’re fired for not working hard enough.
Women with young children but no husband are, as usual, in ample supply this year in made-for-the-holiday movies, which tend to be concentrated on the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime, outlets pitched to a weird demographic of women who are smart, capable overachievers yet are incomplete if they don’t have a man they can get gooey-eyed about.
There is, for instance, “Christmas on the Bayou” (Dec. 14, Lifetime), in which a career woman (Hilarie Burton) with a young son takes a holiday break from her hectic New York City life and goes home to Louisiana. It doesn’t take her long to find the man who has been missing from her life, a fellow who — a recurrent Christmas miracle in these movies — also bonds instantly with her sullen child. Ed Asner turns up as the swamp-dwelling Papa Noel, using a bayou accent that has to be heard, and then played backward, to be appreciated.
Another young mother in need of a man turns up in “Finding Christmas” (Dec. 15, Hallmark), this one played by Tricia Helfer of “Battlestar Galactica.” She, too, finds her soul mate in a matter of days because love, in holiday movies, is instantaneous and effortless.
“Finding Christmas” is most notable, though, for the presence of J. T. Hodges, normally a country singer but here an actor. Mr. Hodges, a newcomer to the acting thing, is surprisingly good, and the script also leads his character to an open-mike night in which he sings a delightful “Joy to the World.” (Later, appallingly, that same script forces him to turn “Silent Night” into a sort of seduction song, because, in these movies, the sacred and the cheesy are co-mingled.)
More omnipresent even than singers is the universal demon of the holiday season: work. In practically all of these movies, someone is working so hard that he or she is in danger of not appreciating the wondrous beauty of a garishly decorated tree or amateurishly performed Christmas pageant.
Ms. Burton’s character in “Christmas on the Bayou” is a workaholic. In “Let It Snow” (Saturday, Hallmark), Alan Thicke plays a father too busy to celebrate Christmas with his adult daughter, and that daughter (Candace Cameron Bure) is fairly no-nonsense, too.
Perhaps the weirdest work-is-bad movie of this season is “A Snow Globe Christmas” (Dec. 14, Lifetime), a holiday story with a bit of the summer sci-fi hit “Under the Dome” mixed in. Alicia Witt plays a maker of television holiday movies — yes, it’s a Christmas in metaland — who is bopped on the head and wakes up inside a snow globe, where she has a husband she wasn’t aware of and almost ruins the community Christmas pageant. Or something like that.
the best show to counteract an excess of cheer is the Dec. 18 installment of the Animal Planet series “Monsters Inside Me,” which recreates true stories of parasitic infections and other horrific diseases. This episode, “My Christmas From Hell,” consists of three harrowing tales of people who grappled with rare, serious medical conditions during the holidays.
One involves a woman who returns to her Colorado home after traveling abroad. (The Belize tourism board, if there is such a thing, is not going to like this show.) Her husband eventually finds himself removing an unwanted creature from her scalp.
“As I started to pull on the worm with the tweezers,” he recalls, “it was almost like a rubber band. It stretched a lot.”
An unforgettable Christmas, to be sure.