Weepy

John Boehner and I have several things in common.  We both know how to shed a tear or two, many of mine thanks to Hallmark and Lifetime Movie Network, starting around Thanksgiving.  That's when we get bombarded with hundreds of feel good, if only things really went that way, Christmas movies.  My better half burns up the DVR with every movie they offer.  B actors, weak dialogue, overacting...and situations that rarely, if ever, happen in real life,  There are 4 basic storylines and if you can put all of them in 1 movie, you've got a ratings bonanza.

First, the deployed soldier.  That one can happen but very rarely.  He comes home in his fatigues. (I would have rather put peas up my nose than travel in fatigues)  Uncle Sam puts staffing requirements first, and in time of war, only a rare few are allowed to go home, and even then at mid-tour.  I only came home once for Christmas and that was in peacetime.  We had 3 slots that could go home, and our Network Commander made the choice.  Only 4 wanted to go home, and the one who couldn't didn't really care.

I was going home to introduce my 3 1/2 month old daughter to the parents and things started badly.  We were flying charter and were waiting at Frankfurt International when we found out the DC-8 we were to fly in had the windshield blow out over Bangor, Maine and the flight would be delayed for 8 hours.  Luckily I had a Brother in Law who lived nearby so the 8 hour delay was just an annoyance.

When we finally got airborne, we sat across the aisle from some guy who could barely fit in the seat and sounded like he had stage 4 lung cancer...so for 9 hours, he coughed almost constantly.  We were all ready to ask the pilot to drop to a thousand feet and open the doors and throw him out.  Forget about sleeping.

We took the bus from the Port Authority the next morning and my father was waiting, insisted on taking the baby's carrier, and promptly dropped her in a snow drift.  It was horrendously cold and lot's of snow that I had learned to live without,  We had snow in Germany but it was measured in inches, not feet.  When we got to the old homestead, we found my father had gone all out on the decorations.  Clark Griswold would be ashamed..A 3 foot plastic tree with 25 twinkling lights.  That was Christmas Eve day.

On Christmas Eve we exchanged gifts.  I had gone overboard for gifts for them.  A state of the art Texas Instrument for my father..This was 1975 so they were God awful expensive.  I forget what I got my mother but it was also something outrageously expensive.  Their present to us..Each of us including the baby got a 20 dollar bill.

Each morning we counted down the days until we were airborne and heading back to Germany, leaving the Twilight zone and going back to sanity.

For me, that was one of the worst, and most expensive, Christmases I ever spent.  So the returning warrior storyline may happen, but only to a very, very few.

The second storyline is the guy or girl who accidently runs into a memory from long ago and they fall in love and pick up where they left off.  A former girlfriend or fiance should also be a best friend and when you lose one, you lose the other.  I tried once to get that person back, and it didn't go well.  So that storyline is a pure fairy tale of dreams that can never come true, not even at Christmas.  Most of us reluctantly move on.

The third storyline is the most bizzare..Santa sets up his workshop next door and, by working his magic, is able to thaw a frozen heart and help somebody find the spirit and the meaning of Christmas just in time for him to make his yearly flight.  Not a whole lot can be said to describe that impossible dream.

And then there's storyline number 4.. Scrooge, the epitome of the business man with the cold heart that suddenly thaws on Christmas Day.  Dickens should have had another chapter to show what Scrooge was like the day after Christmas.  Old habits die hard and for most of his kind, and there are many, old habits don't die just because a few spectres scare the devil out of him.  I suspect that Bob Cratchett was still asking for more coal for the fire.

So there it is, the roadmap to writing a Lifetime Movie Network Fa La La La Christmas classic.  If you can incorporate all 4 storylines into one movie, you've got a blockbuster..and John Boehner and I can be weepy every day until Christmas.