My 92 year-old mother-in-law has discovered the Hallmark Channel. And sometime in mid-August, the Hallmark Channel discovered Christmas. Those two things only relate to me because my mother-in-law lives with us and for twelve hours a day has complete control of the television in the family room.

One of the disadvantages of retirement is that I am sometimes at home for long stretches of time. And, while I avoid the family room as much as I can, I do pass through now and then on my way to the scotch.

There’s a certain, shall we say, sameness to the Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel. All the women smile constantly. No matter what problems and travails beset them, they smile through every line of dialogue. They are all also searching for the perfect man, though they don’t know they are. All the men are congenial, incredibly sensitive and understanding and, otherwise, completely devoid of personality and genitals.

Tonight I walked in on one about a law student whose true passion is her small town’s annual ice sculpting contest. Because, who doesn’t love standing in sub-zero temperatures for hours on end with a chain saw and chisel? She happens to meet a guy who, it just so happens, also loves ice sculpting. What are the odds? They decide to team up and lo and behold win the contest. No one could ever have predicted that. As nearly as I could tell they sculpted a house with an elk on the roof and a dolphin in the front yard. And that tells you a lot about the other sculptures, none of which are shown. But wait, there’s more. They fall in love and she turns her back on the law to become a full-time ice sculpture contestant, which must be able to occupy her for a solid three weeks a year. And the prize money? I don’t know, probably in the high double figures. Her family, who put her through law school at great personal sacrifice, is, of course, overjoyed that she’s found true happiness. Who wouldn’t be? She’s our little girl after all.

That happy story was followed immediately by a woman whose full-time job – eight hours a day, five days a week, twelve months a year — is to select the official Christmas tree for Chicago. She searches high and low for a tree, presumably at pine forests. She has an office full of assistants. Can you say fiscal responsibility? But that’s not the point. She is known as Miss Christmas and her name is, wait for it, Holly.

Ten days before the tree is supposed to be delivered the truck driver manages to somehow scrape half the limbs off the Official Tree. But the next day Holly finds another tree, which of course begs the question if you can find a “perfect” tree in a day what do you do the other eleven months and twenty eight days of the year? But, hey, it’s a movie.

I suppose there are a couple of twists and turns along the way to flesh out the story for an hour and a half or however too long these things run, but I can’t fill in that blank for you. About the time a bunch of people sat down for dinner and smiled and toasted and smiled some more, I lapsed into diabetic coma.

And this goes on hour after hour, day after day, for months. If there wasn’t already a war on Christmas, I’d enlist in one.

Bah humbug.