IN WHICH The Girl Learns Christmas Lessons

Everything I need to know about love, I learned from a Christmas movie. Said no one. Granted, there are some nice lessons in Christmas films, such as being good to others and the importance of family. However, ridiculous lessons abound as well.

First, let's be clear what I mean by a Christmas movie because I'm not talking about Elf. I do not mean legitimate films that are shown in movie theaters. I'm thinking about the made-for-television Christmas movies - mainly romances - seen on ABC Family, Lifetime, and the Hallmark Channel. One of my not-so-secret guilty pleasures is watching these films every year about this time. I think I literally watched five of them yesterday. I put them on while cleaning and then got together with a friend to watch a couple more. Don't judge me! Nevertheless, I do realize how ridiculous and terrible these films are. I think that's part of what makes watching them so fun. They are silly but rarely take themselves seriously; therefore, you can make fun of them but also enjoy the experience.

A lot of these Christmas films follow similar romantic comedy story lines. They have some pretty outlandish ideas about life, love, and the holidays:

8 Christmas Movie Love Lessons

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman over 22 must be in want of a husband. Yes, I just plagiarized Pride and Prejudice. Granted, these are romances, so people seeking mates is not unusual. However, the pressure put on women (most of the films are aimed at a female audience and therefore have female protagonists/victims of marriage pressure) by family, friends, and themselves is immense. Family members in these films seem to see any unmarried woman out of college as a complete failure. Oh you have a good job? Who cares? Life is worthless without a good man! The moms are always the worst. In Holiday Engagement, the mom (Shelly Long) has to tell her daughter at least twenty times that she's not getting any younger. This has then led to three daughters in horrible relationships to make the mother happy. My parents didn't really start putting on the pressure (and very light pressure at that) until I hit 30. I also think the pressure has absolutely nothing to do with me getting married or finding the right man. It's entirely focused on the fact that they want grandchildren. Apparently though, my parents are the exception, not the rule.

2. If you are not able to get a boyfriend, or you break up with your boyfriend, the obvious solution is to find a man to pretend to be your boyfriend for the holidays - or even kidnap one if necessary. The fake boyfriend is a very popular trope in these films. Since her mother is such a nag, the woman in Holiday Engagement hires an actor to play her fiance, who inconveniently broke up with her a few days before Thanksgiving. My favorite example of this is another film, Holiday in Handcuffs, in which Melissa Joan Hart actually kidnaps Mario Lopez and takes him to her family's Christmas celebration. See this great Buzzfeed post about the film. Granted, the fake couples always fall in love, so this might be a good strategy. Insanity seems to work well. Or Stockholm Syndrome at least. I haven't tried kidnapping yet, but maybe this year.

3. Speaking of insanity, stalking is also a good way to find a man. If you see someone you like, just insert yourself into their lives. They will obviously then fall in love with you. In Dear Santa, a woman finds a sad letter to Santa asking for a new mom for Christmas. She then stalks the dad, starts working where he does, starts babysitting the kid, and even when he finds out she lied about everything to be part of his and his child's lives, he decides she's awesome. Maybe I should be be looking through the mail.

4. Not everyone finds their mate through crazy schemes though. In many circumstances, the perfect man has been waiting for you all along in your hometown. Usually, it's someone from your past. Maybe your high school boyfriend, though more likely your high school best friend that you never realized you actually love. In Christmas Crush, the girl returns home for Christmas and the high school reunion. She hopes to get back with her quarterback boyfriend, who turns out to be a douche, and instead realizes her best friend was the one all along. Unfortunately, I have not found this strategy of just returning home to produce boyfriends out of the woodwork. I tend to only run in to people from high school on those nights when a friend says, "Come on, let's go out. You don't even need to get dressed. Just wear your sweats. No one will be out on Christmas night." Then, of course, you realize that every single person you went to high school with is out on Christmas because no one can stand their families anymore.

5. If none of these strategies for finding a boyfriend work, someone will set you up with Mr. Right. In 12 Dates of Christmas (this is a good one), the protagonist's stepmother sets her up on a blind date (Zach Morris!) on Christmas Eve. One, who goes on a date on Christmas Eve? Two, it's someone they are planning to actually spend Christmas with this year, so if the date goes badly you can't escape them. She keeps reliving the day a la Groundhog Day until she falls in love - and learns to be a nicer person. My mother has never tried to set me up on a blind date, and I love her for this.

6. Now, one of the reasons women have so much trouble finding a husband is because they work way too much. In this feminist society, women have become obsessed with their jobs and have no time to find the right guy. Or they have met someone at work who is obviously not the right guy because he too loves work too much to love a woman. Caring about your career is bad. Obviously, we all need to find a way to balance our personal and professional lives but the way these movies portray working women is ridiculous. Christmas Cupid has a career obsessed publicist who ignores her mother, her friends, and the right guy all because of her job. She also tries to get ahead by marrying the boss. She eventually finds, through the help of the ghost version of a dead party girl actress in A Christmas Carol fashion, the error of her ways. Should I stop working? Hmm, I think then I will just be even more broke and single.

7. Once you do meet someone with potential, it is completely acceptable to propose after a few days or without ever having dated or even after several years of never seeing one another. Most of these relationships are instalove and the couples meet, fall in love, and get engaged within several days. Because you obviously want to commit the rest of your life to someone you have known less than a week. Even for those people who have known each other a long time or dated at one point, they have usually been separated for a while. Love at the Christmas Table - this might be my favorite Christmas movie ever despite its obvious flaws - tells the story of a boy and girl (Winnie from The Wonder Years) who grew up together and always go to the same Christmas party every year. They obviously have a connection but never actually date (they only kiss once  - well twice if you count the time they were 13 and she stabbed him with a fork - in twenty-odd years). They get in a huge fight during one Christmas party and the guy doesn't return for five years. They haven't seen each other in five years, but he returns and proposes at this final Christmas party. Of course she says yes. What? That's crazy! Though I'm not going to lie; it may bring tears to my eyes every time.

8. Lastly, beware of snow globes. This one actually has nothing to do with romance. However, there are at least two Christmas films where the characters get trapped in a snow globe: Holidaze and the aptly named Snowglobe. If you have a snow globe sitting around, you should get rid of it immediately! I warned you.

This is just the tip of the made-for-television Christmas movie iceberg. There are soooo many more. Now get watching, so that you know how to find love as well! Happy Holidays!

IN WHICH The Girl Breaks Codes

BBC Night - the night in which I watch British shows with my grad school friends - had hit a lull for a few months. We had run out of episodes of the shows we often watch and hadn't come across a good, new one yet. Instead, we had spent a couple months of our get togethers re-watching mini-series we had already seen and trying out dissatisfying shows. But then we read this description on Netflix: "When former codebreaker Susan Gray spots a hidden pattern in a series of murders, she enlists her wartime friends to try and track down the murderer." Codebreakers! Smart women working together! Crime solving! We immediately knew The Bletchley Circle was the show for us.

While on the surface The Bletchley Circle appears to be a show about a group of women investigating a crime on their own, the show mainly revolves around the after-effects of war. We are first introduced to the four main characters when they work in Bletchely Park, the British government's site for codebreakers during WWII. I think one of the reasons I was so drawn to the show was because I loved The Imitation Game, and you can see the Turing machine working away in the background. A German Enigma also becomes useful at one point in the show. Due to their high intelligence, these women worked out of Bletchley finding patterns in Nazi communications and were instrumental in the war.

However, the timeline quickly jumps forward seven years. The war is long over and lives have returned to "normal." We get to see how differently people react to life after the war, and how both men and women are affected. Susan, the main character played by the wonderful Anna Maxwell Martin (see her in North and South, Bleak House, Death Comes to Pemberley), has since become a housewife and mother. Her husband is a vet whose leg was injured by the war. Within this one marriage, we see two drastically different reactions to the end of the war. Susan's husband relishes the quiet, almost boring, job that he now has with the government. The trauma of the war and his handicap has led him to avoid risks of any sort in his current life. Susan, on the other hand, misses the excitement of the war. She's genius-level smart, but her intelligence was only considered useful during the war. Once the war ended, she had to return to a more traditionally female role. On top of that, Susan can't even tell anyone about her important role in the war due to the Official Secrets Act. Her husband seems to have never noticed that she's smarter than the average crayon, and once this becomes obvious, he is clearly emasculated by the concept.

We see an interesting juxtaposition of ideas about women as Susan starts her investigation of a series of murders based on patterns she notices in the news reports. When she first introduces the idea to her husband, he thinks she is being ridiculous, but the only way she can get someone higher up to listen to her is through her husband. To placate her, he uses his government connections to get a meeting with the police. The police inspector is actually willing to give her the time of day because of his suppositions about her part in the war, being a military man himself. So again we see a respect for women's intelligence when related to war, but rarely outside of it. Of course, when her first clue doesn't pan out, no one will give her the time of day a second time. However, this gives her a great excuse to collect her former codebreaking friends and solve it themselves.

The murder mystery, without giving too much away, also ends up relating back to the war. This time we see the disturbing psychological effects war can have on people. A man who probably had some issues to begin with is then traumatized by a horrifying event in the war. Seven years later, he is still reacting to that trauma. In addition, the show portrays what people within the military might do to protect their wartime secrets.

Overall, I recommend The Bletchley Circle not only because it has an interesting mix of characters and mystery, but also because it takes an good look at how war doesn't end when the fighting stops and the position of women both during and after WWII.

Warning: The first series of The Bletchley Circle is excellent, and the first two episodes of Series 2 are good, but stop there. Things fall apart in the last two episodes of Series 2. It's best to pretend those don't exist.