Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve I wore out the Hallmark and LifeTime channels watching Christmas movies, my first time doing a marathon like that. (I know, I’m a gluten for punishment.) Last night, all I saw of the New Year’s Eve festivities on TV was the final 28 seconds of the ball dropping in Time Square then I turned back to a stupid Christmas movie about a three-years-out widow who found love again. Did you know that a surprising number of Christmas movies feature widows finding love again? I didn’t. Other popular themes seem to be the workaholics and the confirmed bachelors/bachelorettes who find love. Christmas, apparently for some script writers, means it’s a good time for romance. Queue the mistletoe and the people who invite their single friends home for the holidays who accidentally meet their neighbor/brother/uncle/the lonely widow who sings in choir or the single father who owns a coffee shop and you have a genre holiday movie. And I can think of at least three house swapping Christmas romance movies including the one last night. There seems to be a rule about house swapping movies that requires not one, but two couples to fall in love and at least one of the four must be widowed.
The overload of romance Christmas movies didn’t bother
me---it’s Hallmark and LifeTime, after all and they do genre, formula films so
I knew what I was in for---but what really got me irritated with the Christmas
movies is how many costume directors don’t seem to know that snow is cold! They
have couples walking along snowy streets, having snowball fights and watching tree lighting ceremonies while wearing nothing more than summer weight
clothing. Hint to movie makers who grew up where it never snows: when there’s two
foot of that white stuff on the ground and snow is gently falling, it’s below
32 degrees! Your actors should be wearing coats unless you show them with their
teeth chattering so much they couldn’t find each other’s mouths for a romantic,
winter kiss if they tried. And high heels might be sexy but they aren’t ski
lodge and icy sidewalks friendly.
One widow themed Christmas movie I saw twice and on one
level it intrigued me because it feathered the woman’s devoted husband who
appeared as a ghost that only her teenage son could see until near the end of
the film when the ghost finally appeared to his wife as well. The ghost said she couldn’t
see or feel him because she was still mad about him dying and leaving her with
so much debt and responsibility. Thus, he couldn’t go on to where ever it is
that ghosts/spirits go. But true to genre romance films along came a white knight,
aka her son’s school counselor and a widower himself, who saves her from being
alone and lonely. She finally forgives her died husband allowing his ghost to pop
into her life to say a final goodbye. The timeline of her finding love again so
closely following her husband’s car accident and his spirit appearing in her
life was totally unrealistic and silly in my opinion but it got me thinking about
my experience with Don’s ghost in the house. (I wrote about here.)
At the time I thought I had a ghost in the house I vacillated between thinking there had to be a
logical explanation for what was going on with my wedding ring appearing where
I didn’t leave it and thinking that Don’s spirit was playing head games with me.
But after all this time passing with no more ‘ring incidences’ the most logical
explanation leads me to believe spirits do hang around awhile after the
physical body dies. Before then, I believed spirits and ghosts fell in
the realm of pure fiction. Like the teenager in the movie who felt his dad
around him, I could feel Don around me until sometime this past summer when one
day I woke up and couldn’t feel him close-by anymore. Even though life got
lonelier after that revelation I viewed it as widowhood progress. It was like
Don had decided I was standing on solid ground and I didn’t need handholding
anymore.
I’m glad the holidays are over. They started out with so
much promise but ended in a whimper. I didn’t manage my holiday expectations
very well and that led to unnecessary disappointments. I also didn’t make any
resolutions to start the New Year which, except for last year, is out of
character for me. For 2013 instead of resolutions I used a one word mantra of ‘courage’
and that worked well for me. I repeated it many times over the first part of
the year, to get me out of my comfort zone. For 2014 I thought about picking ‘choose
your change’ as a mantra for the new year but then I decided that makes it sound
like I’m expecting a whole year of transition. Instead, I going with the mantra
of ‘seek contentment’ which I hope will help me keep a tighter lid on my
expectations and help me to settle in, building within the social circles I established
last year. I have the bones to a more satisfying life, I just need to flesh it out.
Whatever you’re goals for 2014, I hope we'll all find success
in the coming months. ©
