Truly Unpredictable Hallmark Movie Plots

Hallmark Christmas movies are delightfully derivative and sappy and unrealistic and all the things we love at the holidays while we pretend the world isn't an absolute hell hole. 

There are those of us who want to see a truly realistic, even gritty, portrayal of life as it really goes in one of these Hallmark films. 

Here are a few plot ideas: 

1. She kills it at her job. She is sent to a quaint little winter hamlet to do a story on the "vanishing of quaint little hamlets." She meets this guy, a handyman, who turns out to be a prince, or at least a really rich dude. They put up this playful crackling banter with each other for a few minutes and then fall madly in love. But she is torn, you see, between the life of a world killer globetrotter journalist type and a small town nobody family woman. She seeks counsel from that snarky friend, and from her parents, and they of course counsel love above all. But she takes the job and he ends up marrying his old girlfriend. The End.

2. A developer wants to take over a centuries old family farm. He is ruthless. The farm owner is an old man with a beautiful daughter. The old man is in serious debt and the farm isn't making the money it used to. The developer decides to travel to the small town where this farm is located to make the old farmer an offer he can't refuse. He meets the daughter, and there is an icy initial dialogue, but there is also heat because they are both attractive. He makes his offer to the father, but the father cusses him out and storms out. While in town the developer sees the daughter working as a bartender, and then there is banter. Some drunk dude tries to make a move on her, but the developer steps to her aid, beating that dude to a bloody pulp. But the thing is he went a bit too far, and the man dies. The wife of that dude presses charges, and the developer is charged with murder and put away for life. The movie ends with her visiting him in prison, bringing his favorite carrot cake muffins. A cautionary tale about anger management. The End.

3. A family owned vineyard and bed and breakfast has fallen into disrepair. The old Cabernet vines are in bad shape, and so is the old house and the barn and all. A struggling couple decides to give their marriage one last try by going to this charming old bed and breakfast and vineyard. After a few days in this magical place, they find each other again and renew their vows on the old victorian porch. It is all magically set at Christmas. At the Christmas morning breakfast, after a night of passionate love making, he eats something and goes into anaphylactic shock and dies. The wife sues and the owner loses, forcing bankruptcy and the sale of the place. Now it is a parking lot for a strip mall. The End.

4. It's a time of war. But at Christmas the men find a lovely chateau owned by a beautiful woman. She takes them in, though they are from the enemy's side, and feeds them and provides them shelter. The captain, a widower, is drawn powerfully to her. For weeks they are with her in her home while they are healing from their wounds. There are several scenes of her dabbing sponges on his bare body. During this time they fall madly in love with each other. They go on walks through the fields, and laugh and pick flowers. They chase each other for some reason and fall down onto each other for some reason and kiss passionately. One day after recovering from his wounds, he sets out to put Christmas lights up on the exterior of the old chateau. While high up on the ladder the man falls and dies. She weeps and throws the rest of the men out and vows to report them. The End.

5. She is a poor girl from a broken family. But she is also brilliant and sweet, and a mysterious rich man makes her his special interest and, unbeknownst to her, names her beneficiary of his substantial estate. She receives various acceptance letters from prestigious colleges, but even with scholarships she simply can't afford to go. At Christmas the old man dies and she learns she is a bazillionaire. He turns out to be her miserable father who left her and her mother when she was three. She punishes him after his death by becoming an embittered harpy of a woman, spending all of his money on frivolous luxuries, avoiding responsibility by living a debauched life, having several abortions when in her 20's, and finally, after four divorces, dying alone in her cottage in Aspen with her Persian cats all around her. The End.

Woman Takes Courageous Stand in Affirming What All the Powers Tell Her to Affirm

Beatrice Franklin is hopping mad! And she is going to let you know about it in the most courageous way possible. She is going to repost some jarring memes on social media, the single most dangerous place on planet earth. Some might think that no-mans-land in World War 1, or religious fidelity in a time of persecution, or taking to the seas during the age of exploration, or things like that are the contexts of the greatest courage required of people in human history. Forget soldiers or explorers or faithful men and women. Beatrice has come that you might have an exemplar of bravery in these perilous times.

Not only has she stormed the ideological beach of Normandy, but she comes with opinions so bold, so razor sharp, so original, so beautiful, that they can only be uttered by the most courageous of the courageous class! She is so courageous that she is like a woman wearing daisy dukes taking a stroll down the streets of Kabul. 

Her social media feed includes such culturally radical forays into battle as these:

“White people are so racist it disgusts me. I feel sick being white.” 

“Women’s bodies are their own bodies and they can eject parasites inside them if they want to! Parasites are gross!"

"If women were in charge, there would so much less killing!"

“Everyone should be free to love whoever they love for as long as the loving lasts.”

"Capitalism enslaves!"

“Gas powered cars and plastic bottles and billionaires are killing the planet. Buy a Tesla and a yeti!”

“Rich people are so greedy. They should give their Tesla’s to college students.”

“College should be free, like the credit card my dad gave me.”

Now one would think that with such radical and minority views Beatrice would surely be facing persecution, and that probably is coming soon for such steely and courageous bravery, but most days she is only forced to summon her courage in facing her too hot chai tea latte at Starbucks, never yielding in her laser focus for social change from the plush safety of her corner booth. Thank you, Beatrice, for standing in the gap for all of us. 

The Capricious Judgementalism of the Modern Culture Clone on Social Media

They hate it when you judge them by some religious set of standards and principles. They hate it with a ferocity that borders on madness. You will leave them to the unquestioned liberty of their perverse sexuality, gender confusion, Marxist envy ethic, infanticide, disrespect of elders, flippancy, worship of celebrity, worship of the planet, narcissism, anger, racial insanity, corruption, vulgarity, debauchery, slothfulness, unteachable pride, and judgmentalism! They are who they are, and you can shut the hell up! 

The nearly stupefying irony—stupefying that they don’t see it—is the intensity of their own capricious judgmentalism. 

How dare you not wear a mask! How dare you not admit you are a racist! How dare you not adopt poor children before you condemn killing the unborn! You hypocrite! How dare you not put the plastic in the recycle! How dare you drink unsustainable Columbian coffee! How dare you wear Nike! How dare you critique T Swift! How dare you be white and not show contrition! How dare you earn more than the poor! How dare you do anything against the orthodoxy? Condemnation upon condemnation angrily erupts from these people like some acrid caldera. The last place you want to be is near it. 

And what is the orthodoxy they uncritically proclaim? And on what is it based? You will never fully know because in an evolutionary scheme ethics is presumably ever changing according to herd dynamics. You just have to repeat what the alphas in the heard tell you. There is no internal logic, no unifying set of principles! There is only power! Adapt or become strong enough to rule. There is nothing else! 

Man Identifies as Semi-Sexual

 Local man Frank Higgins recently came out to the shock of literally everyone as "Semi-Sexual." The term basically means that Frank defines himself by larger constructs than his mere sexuality and identified gender.  He prefers to identify as a Christian father and husband and lover of wisdom rather than by how often and with whom he copulates. After all, one can only have sex perhaps .05% of one's whole life. But Frank has frankly not done the research on this, but he is nevertheless proud of the dad joke. 

"I think that sexuality is important and all, but it seems to me that it constitutes only a small fraction of how I want to be known and what I actually do. I mean, I am a Christian and I like great books and big ideas and I love to make my kids laugh and I want to learn wisdom and travel and discuss important things with friends."

These radical and controversial ideas were uttered in open space where others could hear Frank, causing a major backlash. 

Said one transgender bystander whose ear holes were violated by Frank's ignorance and heteronormativity, "It is offensive and insensitive to the LGBTQ community to even know that such people exist. I thought by now that everyone agreed with us that sexuality is everything and should be discussed everywhere and that there is nothing else interesting about human beings. First we were hated, and now we are being dismissively ignored. Things have obviously only gotten worse for us!"

The good news is that activists were able to cancel Frank and ban his various utterances on social media, so that they wouldn't have to know about him living out his balanced and deeply fulfilled life. 

The Counter-Intuitive Genius of The Postmodern Left

 I've decided to catalog a few ideas swirling about in our postmodern liberal culture these days. You've no doubt seen these ideas in your social media feeds and in the incessant sermonizing of various liberal media sources. Most of it is distilled from the echo chambers of the public schools and universities, and often is transmuted by pop culture and the less academic into widely absorbed sound bits and slogans and images. What I find most interesting about so many of these is that they hold internal contradictions. 

1. Capitalist Hellscape: You are told to believe that America is a uniquely wicked and greedy nation and also that this wonderful land of opportunity should be open to all people, but especially people of color. 

2. Racist Hellscape: You are told to believe that America is a uniquely racist nation, where people of color will be oppressed and victimized and also that the border should be open to people of color who want to make a better life for themselves in this miserable land that stacks the deck against them. 

3. Gender and Race are Obviously not Analogical: You are told that gender is a social construct unanchored to biology and also that race anchored to biological reality is essential to a person's identity and group belonging. 

4. Global Warming is Worse Than Universal Cooling: You are told to believe that the human parasite is responsible for the great evil of global warming and also that evolution is an undirected process that for all we know is simply winnowing creatures that can't survive a few more degrees in temperature. And also someday it will be too cold for anything to survive anyway, and anywhere. 

5. Moral Geniuses Everywhere: You are to accept as authoritative a new series of moral pronouncements that are intensely affirmed while also believing that all moral pronouncements arise from the unstable epiphenomenal debris of human speculation. 

6. Women Create Ex Nihilo: If a woman intends her unborn child to be a member of the human race, then it will be treated thus and even protected by law. If she wills it to end, then it is does not count as human. In other words, the fiat of the woman confers upon the unborn its status as human or strips it of that status. And yet we are also to believe that women continue to be unfairly stripped of power. 

7. Objectification is Nuanced: You are scolded for objectifying women while so many women express their feminine freedom and power by intentionally flaunting their own bodies in social media and in various forms of entertainment. Women can occupy the social media space demanding that they be not objectified while posting pictures of themselves that are obviously attempts to draw the eyes of people. Men are clearly not wondering what she thinks about Cartesian dualism when she posts a revealing selfie. And for that reason, men are pigs.

8. Pay Them Back for Your Ancestor's Sins: White people 150 years after slavery should pay back the descendants of black slaves for their ancestor's sins. But what is the stature of limitations on pay backs? Should black people pay for their ancestors sins if they descend from a tribe in Africa that enslaved other tribes in Africa? Do German descendants of Nazi Germany need to pay for what was done to Jews? Should Native Americans pay another tribe that their tribe victimized? We are told to believe that reparations are only upon white people, and only for crimes committed by their ancestors, and only up to a particular time, and this all on the authority of our betters. The concept of reparations is as clear as black and white. 

Also, black people and black culture are strong and independent of white capitalistic culture, yet reparations are necessary for the full renaissance of black culture in America.

9. College Should Be Free: You are told that student loans that students voluntarily secure for degrees in gender studies are a way of the rich taking advantage of the poor and should therefore be forgiven, and that college should be free. Now even if teachers agree that college should be free, they are not likely to forfeit their salaries and benefits, and certainly the administrators won't volunteer their salaries, so presumably the "government" should pay for the costs of education. But what exactly is the government if not other people? And what then should college really cost? Who determines this? If there are massive tax increases, then everyone gets to pay, and no doubt the whole show will run into deficit spending as in every other government program. Usury is evil apparently, but naive debt is not. This all means that one day these college grads will pay massive taxes either directly through tax increases or indirectly through inflation. In short, it will not be free and what they are really saying is that they don't want to pay for it. 

10. We Are Animals, But You Should Care for The Disadvantaged Animals: You are told that human beings emerged from the godless and mindless struggle for survival, wherein the strongest survive and claim residential advantage, and also that you should care for historically disadvantaged groups. 

11. Give or We Will Take It: You are told that you should care enough to give toward the needs of others, which includes college education, food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and good paying jobs with ample benefits for all, and also that it really doesn't matter if you care about these things since government will take your resources to give it to those in "need" anyway. Government will effectively function as your conscience, but you should also give as a matter of conscience. Now that is confusing, unless you believe it.

Church Finally Achieves Total Behavior Quotient Sufficient to be The Gospel

At year 20 of its life cycle, Taycan Church of Newport Beach has finally achieved a total behavior quotient such that it can reliably rise above the charge of hypocrisy and represent itself as the hope of the gospel in the world. 

In a bold move that pushes the church beyond theology and into the deepest areas of cultural need, Taycan Church has been tracking the overall behavior quotient of their church for 20 years, believing that Christian behavior has been so bad that the world cannot hear the gospel. 

Said pastor Jerome Stevenson, “Jesus told us to peach the gospel at all times and sometimes use words. We finally realized that what matters is not what Jesus did as a dry point of historical reference or declarative theology, but what is happening through us now. How have our hearts and hands changed as a result of experiencing Jesus? Most Christians make the gospel unbelievable by their lives.”

The pastoral team of Taycan church has developed a detailed missional algorithm that tracks tithe contributions, time spent in devotional activities, service activities, church attendance, care for the planet and disenfranchised groups, along with various other good Christian behaviors, and then measures for negative behaviors like greed with money, rage driving, racism, drinking alcoholic beverages too much on weekdays, watching bad things on electronic devices, failing to recycle, and so on. The system then assigns a value for each parishioner. The aggregate score must then rise above the minimum score that pastoral experts have established for "generally good secular behavior." And Taycan church has finally risen above the minimum score. 

"Now what Jesus did can finally make sense to the watching world," said pastor Stevenson. "Jesus inspires us to be our best selves, and at Taycan at least we are finally seeing the difference he can make." 

Critics have noted that some of the reason that Taycan's total aggregate score improved over the past 20 years is that the truly sinful people left the church for churches that teach the old understanding of the gospel, but that is merely unsubstantiated speculation. Pastor Stevenson is confident that his church has by all metrics improved to the point that Jesus is alive and well in the superior collective of Taycan Church. 

The Woke Washington Football Team

Since the NFL and other pro sports teams have taken up the cause of linguistic cleansing, it seems appropriate to suggest a few new names for the team from Washington, since they still can't figure out what to name themselves. In keeping with the league's current drive toward racial equity and inclusion, each idea was carefully culled from various sensitivity trained think tanks within modern American high schools, led by their teachers, whose bachelor's degrees from modern liberal secular universities make them among the smartest people ever to walk the planet. Any of the following names is clearly better than the former name, which was clearly hate speech, along with any other name pulled from Native American culture. The Braves and Chiefs and Indians can also consider some of these alternatives:

The Washington Woke

The Washington Adorable Woodland Creatures

The Washington Puppies 

The Washington Cancel Culture (the helmet can be all white with a black X on it)

The Washington Inclusivists (And the team could model this by representing all groups equally, including finally providing opportunities for women in the sport, other than as referees or kickers. It is high time we address the obvious sexism in the sport and put a few women at middle linebacker.)

The Washington Defunders (you know, because of the police...)

The Washington Cherry Tree (something like Stanford's move, but more Washington in terms of geography)

The Washington Django Unchained (a nod to a true race pioneer, Quinten Tarantino)

The Washington Recyclers (totally green uniforms with the little recycle symbol as the logo!)

The Washington Biodynamic Farmers (the field could be wild native grasses)

The Washington Socialists (all players paid the same, even if 3rd string)

The Washington Gretas (in tribute to true environmental warrior Greta Thunberg... they could have the little French braids coming out of both sides of the helmet)

The Washington Non-Binaries (Not in the racial sense, of course. Obviously, race is as clear as black and white, but gender is an infinite kaleidoscope. Rainbow colored uniforms here would be a true statement.)

The Tuskegee Air Game (Note that many of the think tank participants took issue with naming the team after the city, because Washington owned slaves. They also take issue with any university, city, state, or school being so named, because the only thing to know about Washington was his white oppression.) 

The Washington Iconoclasts (because it is better to use this chance to destroy the legacy of Washington... the mascot can be a smashed statue of George Washington)

Names involving abstract concepts, which may prove to be less offensive than other options one day: 

The Washington Infinity

The Washington Relativity

The Washington Sustainability

The Washington Multiverse

The Washington Subconscious Yearning

The Washington Peace

The Washington Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis (either Hegelian or Marxian)

Names that bluntly call America what it is as an ongoing reminder of how much it truly sucks: 

The Planet Polluters

The Parasitic Humans

Self-Loathing for Past Sins (the cheerleaders can perform self-flagellation, or simply sit and weep)

The Washington Plantation (a football field of cotton or tobacco)

Inevitable Systemic Racism 

Capitalist Hellscape

The Washington White-Washers (bonus for alliteration... everything white, helmet, uniforms, socks, shoes, banner. Then everyone boos when the team enters...)

The Washington Colonizers 

The options are limitless really. As in all things, we shape our language, and our language shapes us, and then we go back to shaping our language even more. By changing the words we change the world, and by changing the world we change the words. Obviously the world is getting so much better now that things are being more sensitively named. 

Man Attempting to Imitate Jesus Becomes Celibate Carpenter

Seattle, Washington

As with Nicodemus, poor Henry Marshall is perhaps taking things a bit too literally. He recently heard from his pastor at Sienna Church of Seattle that we are to imitate Jesus in all things.

His pastor boldly proclaimed that we live in a culture that emulates foolish cultural heroes and celebrities where it should copy the lifestyle of our cultural savior Jesus. "Jesus came into this world to show us how we ought to live," the pastor confidently and heretically proclaimed.

Since historical Reformed doctrines like justification, regeneration, adoption, and the like, get no traction when one is trying to build a large church, the pastoral staff at Sienna Church decided to mine Jesus' teaching for inspiration in making heaven for ourselves through action, according to our own desires, right here and now.

But silly Henry interpreted his pastor to say that he should immediately leave his wife and enter a trade school to learn the skill of carpentry, and begin selling wooden sculptures at the local farmer's market. The pastoral staff at Sienna immediately intervened, suggesting to Henry that he was perhaps mis-handling the Bible. But Henry remains unwavering. He sites back to the pastors their claims that we are to follow the example of Jesus, and that through our actions of giving up sex and making things out of wood we can make a better world.

The pastoral staff, for their part, clarified what they meant by imitating Jesus. Jesus obviously meant that we were to be vegans and fight against whiteness and climate change and capitalism and America! The pastors are still perplexed that anyone could interpret the Bible so recklessly. Then they returned to their studies of Origen, Rob Bell, and John Yoder. 

Parents Who Can Afford it Buy Boat Instead of Sending Their Kid to Christian School

Dallas, Texas

Bob and Wendy Richey are your average suffering upper middle class parents. They only have two houses, unlike many of their friends who have lots more, and they certainly can’t afford private schooling for their two designer kids.

As committed Christians, they know there is a lot of whacky teaching going on in the public schools, but the public schools are free, kind of. They already pay for obscenely high property taxes in both of their gated communities. 

“We are as disturbed as any that our kids are being taught things we don’t believe about gender and sexuality and the unborn and socialism and postmodernism and identity politics grounded in Marxism and atheism and pretty much everything that is of deepest value in education, but what can we do?”

When it was pointed out that their community was one of the fortunate communities to have a truly Christian high school, in the sense that the school actually teaches theology as a tool to unlock all the arts and sciences, Bob answered that the school in question was “absurdly expensive,” and “how could Christians of conscience charge so much?” and that “Jesus would be a socialist and give away education for free because he said to suffer the little children and all that..." 

"And furthermore," Bob noted, "It's all going to be a waste of money when all these Christian school kids go off to college and become a bunch of clones of the secular universities and the secular culture!" 

And then Bob, exasperated in his own confusion but also blaming the interviewer, slammed the door on his F-350 pulling his 28 foot Cobalt and sped away.

Genius Social Commentator Works Hard to find Flaws in Flawed Human Beings

Washington, D.C.

Liberal voices everywhere are pooling their impressive intellectual resources to find all the flaws.
Said Zephyr Livegood, “So few people today are willing to do the heavy intellectual lifting in our culture.” Grateful that all the world’s brightest and best people live in our times in the shining liberal wonderlands of our big coastal cities and big altruistic universities, she went on:

“We need better leadership than we have had! I mean, while it is true that guys like Washington and Jefferson founded an impressive imperialistic nation—and all I’ve done is get a degree from the University of Virginia and write some blog posts—they were still the bad guys, much worse than me and my friends! We don’t have slaves, or even buy stuff made in Indonesia. All our clothing comes from a Portland co-op."

In an effort to appropriately identify the flawed people, Zephyr was kind enough to supply us with a list of people with whom we can compare our lives to feel superior: 

1. All the people who wore black face at some point in their miserable racist lives, except liberals like Jimmy Kimmel and Robert Downey Jr., because of the context and everything. 
2. Anyone who ever miss spoke on social media or in a college paper or in a high school yearbook or while in preschool.
3. The Police. Obviously!
4. Writers of tone deaf satire. 
5. White people. Even the mostly white people. And even the poor white people. 
6. Men. Especially the white ones. 
7. Rich people. (Except rich black people. And also except all the rich celebrities who think the right way.) 

8. Black people who vote Republican. 
9. Anyone who offends against the ever changing standards of incoherent postmodernists. 

10. Hitler, mostly for being white, like Trump, and like the Police.

Curiously missing from her list was any mention of people like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, or people of that ilk. 

“Grace must be earned with pledges of fidelity to one's comrades. Some people give grace cheaply to anyone who seems sincere in asking for it. We give it only to those who prove to us that they are truly sorry for having been white. We must see public humiliation, cancellation, and groveling obeisance to the collective. Only then will we possibly consider--what is that word--forgiveness."