A Christmas Year (Part 1)

(Image courtesy of istockphoto.com)

I’ve taken to watching a lot of bad Christmas movies each year, in addition to the classics I love. With full acknowledgment that I have zero training as a screenwriter and that this presentation is all over the place, I give you my take on a Hallmark-schlock-style, made-for-TV Christmas movie, A Christmas Year.

This is part one of four.

***

Open on a house, the morning after Christmas. Zoom in, past Santa’s sleigh and the strings of lights, through a picture window. Inside, a table with the bare remains of a turkey carcass, empty wine bottles, half-drank glasses of milk. Pan across a carpet strewn with toys, wrapping paper debris. Pan up slowly an immaculate Christmas tree done up tastefully in white light and tinsel until we reach the angel on top. Pause. The handle of a wooden cane enters frame, loops around the highest bough of the tree and tips the tree slowly before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Cue the chaos of kids protesting, a woman rubbing sleep from her eyes, and dogs barking their heads off as a man drags the tree, with its decorations all still intact through the house, to the open front door, and with superhuman strength and glee flings it from the doorway, across the snowy lawn, to the curb.

Voiceover by our lead actress. A budget-conscious Anna Kendrick type. Her name is Carol. She says, That’s my dad. This is the day after Christmas.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Dad wasn’t a Grinch. From Thanksgiving night when the family came together to put up the tree, straight through when he woke up the morning of December 26, he loved Christmas. But each year, that morning, Christmas was over.

Cue montage of Dad gleefully tossing decorations. Span years with it, during which we see the kids grow up, no longer up early to fight his disassembly of the holiday, but folding pillows over their heads to stave off the early morning noise when they’re still trying to eat.

Cut to dad pacing the living room, eating off of a leftover turkey leg while he lectures the kids on the couch: Christmas is special. But the only way it stays special is to contain it. If we get willy-nilly and leave the tree up until February it becomes a nuisance. A point of shame. And the songs and the movies, we get sick of them. We preserve the magic by not letting it overstay its welcome.

Scan through stock images of holiday revelry ranging from kids sitting on Santa’s lap to ugly sweater parties to a pageant to a midnight mass.

Voiceover: Dad did love Christmas those months. We did all things related to Christmas, like he was trying to fit in as much as he could before the expiration date came each year.

And I loved coming home for Christmas until I got married.

Start scanning through scenes of a wedding, stolen kisses, Carol and her husband getting a dog, spending time with the in-laws, Christmas in another house. Her husband is tall and white and inoffensive. His family is much the same.

Voiceover: I still went home when I could, but we alternated Christmases. Then, we had our reasons not want to travel over the holidays, and stay at our new home instead.

Scan through images of the young couple moving into a house. He carries her over the threshold and they laugh and run their noses against one another. Our lead gives birth to her first child, then her second, then a third. There are paper snow flakes hanging around the hospital bed for the last one.

Voiceover: Our son was born three weeks ahead of his due date, on Christmas Eve. We named him Kringle .

Cue a montage of airports, vacations, hugging increasingly elderly grandparents on both sides as the kids get taller.

And there we were—a happy new family, celebrating the holidays at home. We’d visit my family and my husband’s once twice a year.

That is, until I lost my husband.

Shift music to a sad, slow Christmas song.

We—we didn’t travel much after that.

Truth be told, we weren’t doing so hot. Work was crazy, and the kids were growing up so fast. I hired a caretaker to watch the kids when they got home from school and before I got home from work. Jose drove them to their soccer practices and was so good with Kringle. I don’t know if I would have survived those years without Jose there to go above and beyond. He put his own dating life on hold.

Cue images of Jose, a Latino man in his twenties, consistently clad in pastels and shirts with floral patterns. Intersperse with images of Carol in a business suit, carrying untidy stacks of paper down hallways while talking to colleagues in the hall, Carol leading meetings from the head of a conference table, Carol working by the light of her desk lamp, exhausted long after dark at her desk, holding up a memo and squinting at it.

Jose: It’s not like there’s a dating scene for gay men around here anyway. I’d much rather be a part of your family than try to figure out all of that.

Voiceover: But then one day Mom called and said she needed us to come home. She asked if we could make it for the 4th of July.

Mom: When’s the last time you took a vacation? It’ll be good for you and the kids to be around family again, don’t you think? And I—well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I really think there’s something here you ought to see.