Hi tinseltown heros!
Happy holidays from your friendly neighborhood, elf! I hope you all have lots of cookies within reaching distance and will enjoy the holiday with your chosen family. This Bee is chock full of holiday treats — we have a Brittani coloring page for you, a recap of a straddler holiday party, a rousing game of “Guess the Christmas Movie Plot Based Only On the Title,” and a playlist of ’90s songs for rocking around the Christmas tree.
SEND US THINGS FOR CHRISTMAS:
Via tumblr: aplusbee.tumblr.com
Via email: chelsey [at] autostraddle [dot] com
Don’t forget to download the PDF and print it out to take full advantage of the coloring page and crossword! And join us in the comment section with your movie plot guesses.
See you next year!
xoxo,
Chelsey
12 Dates of Christmas: a woman sits in the corner at a christmas party and eats ten dates. It’s christmas eve and she’s pretty drunk and over this party. She is momentarily excited about the dates, because she got them on sale at Trader Joe’s and they’re pretty delicious. As she slowly eats the dates, she wonders if it is sad that she’s more excited about these dates than the other people at the party. She eats another date (her eleventh), spiraling further into existential dread. She leaves the party, breaks into the now-closed Trader Joe’s, steals all the dates, and burns the grocery store to the ground. Shimmering in the light cast by the flames, She eats the twelfth date. She finally feels alive. END
Merry Christmas!
some locals roast marshmallows over the smouldering wreckage as the closing credits scroll. one person feeds their marshmallow to a tame neighborhood opossum.
when is this coming to theaters
BUT GAL PALS COLORING PAGE
I vote for an Autostraddle colouring book!
The Christmas Consultant: Its 2015 and Santa is facing elfin labor shortages, there’s just no time to be fruitful and multiply when you have to make presents for a billion or so children every year! Worried about how to make the Christmas deadline Mr. and Mrs. Claus brings in the best and brightest manufacturing logistics consultant in the world. Unfortunately she, like the elves, has gotten so busy with work that she has been ignoring having a healthy work life balance and her beautiful wife back home. The mix of silly North Pole magic and elfin antics helps her to see herself in the overworked elves, and not only save Christmases to come but her own well being.
12 Dates of Christmas: Its a month before Christmas, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A cargo ship bound to america loaded with goods for the Christmas season is in trouble, a rogue wave has hit amidship and a young stowaway was flung overboard along with several shipping containers. Swiftly swept away from the ship with the debris the stowaway is brought to the floating Pacific garbage island where the only food to be found is 12 packages of artisanal chocolate covered dates. Eating only half a package a day and drinking water found condensed in the bottom of an inflatable kiddy pool she survives until the unlikely rescue on Christmas day. Survival thriller.
Is it sad that I think I have actually seen The Christmas Consultant, Christmas Incorporated, and Christmas Melody. I don’t even like Christmas movies! Thanks Bravo.
I really feel DC’s 8 Days of Christmas is an underrated song.
Also, it didn’t occur to me that those Xmas films were real, but now I just looked up Christmas Melody and omg that looks amazing.
The Christmas Consultant- a party planner married to their job gets asked to plan their mothers Christmas party- hilarity ensues and they work through some family issues and find joy in the holiday again.
12 Dates of Christmas- an actress no-one has ever heard of before is invited to her ex boyfriends New Years party (he broke up with her last xmas/New Years) and she decides she can’t go alone. Her friends and family and computer all help set her up on several dates in the lead up so she can find someone to take and make her ex jealous. Along the way her old male friend keeps running into her and making fun of all her boyfriends. She finds a gorgeous but boring dude and at the party her ex decides he wants her back but she realises that it was her friend she wanted all along and runs in the snow to find him near an xmas tree/airport somewhere.
Starbucks’ Christmas music this year was refreshingly varied. NSYNC, Christina Aguilera, TLC, Smashing Pumpkins (among lots of others but for a moment while I was there yesterday it was very 90s). And bless them for playing the Muppet’s 12 days of Christmas, but it gets tiring after the second or third listen. Feliz Navidad surprisingly held up through multiple occasions of hearing it. That Christmas song that is some mash up of “Don’t Worry Be Happy”, however, needs to stay out of my ears permanently.
‘Enjoy time with your chosen family’ – yesss thank you <3
are all of those christmas movies from the hallmark channel? because i’m positive i’ve seen them. do they all have to do with recently divorced men OR recently widowed women with a child or three who fall in love with someone of another gender, realize the real meaning of christmas, and get married?
The Christmas Consultant: Precocious child of an event planner only wants more time with her mom for Christmas, so she cooks up a plan to organize the Christmas party of the decade, which everyone in town can’t stop talking about. Mom is desperate to figure out who is outdoing her in the party planning, after much sleuthing and jealousy, it’s revealed to be her daughter, Mom is impressed and realizes spending time with the kid is pretty cool after all, everyone’s Christmas wishes come true.
A Christmas Melody: Teen with cancer is trying to prepare for both the big Christmas concert and Julliard exams, even though she’s not sure she’ll make it until next September. More importantly, she hasn’t worked up the nerve to tell her family that after a childhood of music lessons, she’s not actually interested in music any more, and what she is interested in is her best friend, Melody. As the Christmas concert approaches, she finds the courage to tell the truth, quits the concert, gets the girl, and somehow gets a call from her doctor first thing on Christmas morning that the cancer has gone into remission.
Christmas Mail: Dad tries to send Christmas card to his adult daughter, hasn’t bothered to get her new address even though she moved six months ago, and sends it to her old house, which she can’t go to because her ex-landlords hate her for being gay. Dad learns of mistake and sends Christmas card again, this time to current address. Christmas card gets delivered to neighbours due to mean-spirited mail carrier who refuses to deliver mail correctly or frequently at all. Daughter’s former neighbour/best friend calls to say she has the original copy of Christmas card, leaving Daughter and her partner with two copies. Christmas card (both copies) is actually just a lot of pictures of Dad and his new wife wearing matching clothing throughout the year and new wife’s kids. (Okay, that was my actual Christmas mail. Is it a movie?)
OK I didn’t want to reveal the true plots because all of yours were so amazing but HERE THEY ARE:
The Christmas Consultant: A sought-after holiday consultant is hired by a workaholic mother to get her family through the holidays.
Christmas Incorporated: In this new yuletide tale, Riley is scraping bottom when she miraculously lands a job with a wealthy New York City entrepreneur. He’s a bad-boy socialite type who is poised to play Scrooge by closing one of his factories just before Christmas, which would devastate and entire town. It’s left to Riley to talk him out of it and turn him into a man of virtue rather than shame. But will a case of mistaken identity ruin the whole plan?
A Christmas Melody: Single mother Kristen has recently moved back to her home town of Silver Falls, Ohio with her daughter Emily after her fashion business in Los Angeles folded. The process has been difficult for both of them, especially as the move brings Kristen face to face with Melissa, her former rival from high school and the current president of the local PTA. The two women are instantly at odds with one another, making it necessary for their loved ones to show them the Christmas spirit and help them to overcome their differences.
Christmas Mail: In this holiday romantic comedy, a mysterious woman who works at the post office answering Santa’s mail captures the heart of a disillusioned postal carrier.
12 Dates of Christmas: A story that follows Kate, a young woman who after a horrible blind date on Christmas Eve, wakes up to find she is re-living that same day and date all over again.
Clearly none of these are as good as yours, so you should all go into show business.
so the problem with catching up on old articles is that it’s not the same season for me as when they were published, so i’m not really thinking christmasy thoughts. as a result, may or may not have initially read the article title as “zero christmas bee, zero christmas bee” and been kinda confused about what that meant