CMFTMs -- Groundhog Day, Christmas Edition

Genre: “Groundhog Day, Christmas Edition”
Movies: The 12 Dates of Christmas, Christmas Eve Every Day, The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve, Christmas Do-Over, A Christmas Wedding Date, Three Days … and probably more I don’t know about.

I love the actual “Groundhog Day” movie with Bill Murray. LOVE IT. Watch it every year, on Groundhog Day, and find yet another spiritual paradigm or lesson in it. Is it Buddhist? Christian? I can make an argument in many different directions (ultimate argument: it’s Unitarian Universalist). But I digress.

So, if Groundhog Day is so great, these movies must be terrific, right?

Eh, not so much.

The one I do kinda like, is, I suspect, because I am now a parent. “Christmas Every Day,” in which an ungrateful teenager relives the same day over and over until he GETS IT and starts acting like a wonderful human. But there, that’s probably more about me, less about the movie. See: Mean Mom.

There are so MANY of these! And they’re all the same formula. Protagonist has a sucky day. They wake up the next day, go about their business, at a certain point realizing they’re living the same day. Egad! Gadzooks!

Several days pass of fighting, denial, angst …

Finally, they realize what’s happening. They try to change it. They try to embrace it. Somehow, they eventually find the right Christmas Zen and life stops repeating.

After watching several of these, at a certain point, you, too, will realize …

ERMAGAHRRRRD! I am living my own hellish version of Groundhog-Christmas Day, except I don’t get to eat anything I want with no weight consequences and I don’t get any more time, and it’s almost Christmas and I have wasted all these hours just watching the same show over and over and over!!!

There’s really no good ending to that one. If you must, pick one.

Better yet, wait til Feb. 2 and watch the Real Thing.

Comments

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to...

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James. Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...

CMFTMs 2: "I Want to Schtup Santa Claus."

You are not coming to a CMFTM for originality, or if you are, you'll be pretty disappointed. They're making these babies on the fly, baby, Time is Money, so who has time for originality? As such, most CMFTMs fall into certain oft-used-and-abused genres. Someone even made a handy bingo scorecard of Christmas movie tropes. Today's genre is "I Want to Schtup Santa Claus." This is an interesting genre of holiday movies that seems targeted to Gen X – Boomer females. Why does this appeal to us? I conjecture it’s because of the stop action animation special, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in which a scarily thin Jessica-the-Teacher meets Kris Kringle, he gives her a doll, they get married by the Winter Miser and then she’s allowed to get nice and fat, and he still sits next to her, seemingly still in love, and eternally celebrating Christmas, but without bills or family members, or any of those other pesky things that make Christmas, ...

Boots and Blessings

Search This Blog