ShelleySue

I don't think young viewers watch the Hallmark channels. My daughters are 27 and 23. My son is 19. All three of them love Schitt's Creek. I watch it too and am always pointing out characters that are on it that are also on Hallmark shows.* For example, Kevin McGarry, was on the episode that aired last night. When ever I do that the response is always something like, "Mom, you know I don't watch anything on Hallmark," * Schitt's Creek is a Canadian show

Sometimes, like last night, they are just a waste of precious time. Other times, like when an ingredient has to be added to something that's 3/4 of the way completed, they can sabotage a dessert. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason for them. I assume that the purpose is to show that the kids can think on their feet and do well under pressure, but isn't that what their are all doing anyway with the original challenge?

I have friends who do that. They never know where they are going until the last minute. They go through a travel agent and get great deals on ships that have rooms (cabins) that haven't sold a few days before the ship sails. The only thing that they have to decide in advance if they want to sail out of Miami, LA, San Diego, etc. I hope that people don't think my glasses are fake. I'm nearsighted and take mine off to read.

I'm an attorney in Massachusetts (not criminal, but I do know a thing or two) and that is definitely not the way things work around here. If a town is so small that the police force doesn't have experience with homicides the county and state police will take over the investigation. There is no need for the police chief's dead best friend's retired due to a gun shot wound Boston homicide detective who just happens to live on the island to take over the case. And the state has medical examiners who cover the entire state so that someone with six month's experience in doing autopsies doesn't have to do her own investigating because there is no one else. I just couldn't get over the whole premise to enjoy the movie. Plus I kept cringing every time Jesse fell or landed hard because I was worried the bullet would shift and he'd be paralyzed. I don't think that this series is for me. On the other hand . . . The Gourmet Detective continues to charm me. The premise may have plot holes galore, but the characters have chemistry and humor. I love the dialogue among all of them and I have loved Bruce Boxleitner since the 70's and How the West Was Won (I'm showing my age).

Did anyone else hold their breath while Vicky was testing Tahani? But of course she passed! I'm so proud of Jason! I'm wondering if there's just one Good Place or if everyone has their own Good Place, designed for them.

Another great Alexis line. “I fit my high-school best friend into a suitcase way smaller than this when we were crossing the border between Laos and Vietnam, so I’m pretty sure I can figure this out.” I had to play it four times to get it, but please feel free to correct me if I didn't get it right.

When I was growing up we did get eight gifts, but they weren't eight big gifts. One day it would be a gift from our parents. Another day it would be a gift from one set of grandparents (always a silver dollar). My great-grandmother always gave us a pair of pajamas. We only had one aunt and uncle and a group of first cousins so we'd have a latke party with them and exchange toys. You get the idea. It was a fun time to get together with family, and because it was eight days there was never any conflict of whose family should we spend the holidays with this year -- something that makes Christmas stressful. I will add though that my husband is Christian and I no longer live near any family we celebrate both holidays and I do not give my children (now adults) Chanukah gifts. They always opened my family's gifts on the first night of Chanukah, but I never gave them any. I think that the whole gift at Chanukah thing was to compete with Christmas and since they do get Christmas gifts it would just be too much for them to get both from my husband and me. So we've always done the candles and latkes. We tell the story of Chanukah and play dreidel and give chocolate gelt, but no gifts.

I lost track of how many times I groaned out loud. Speaking as a Jewish person I can tell you that unless Joel was raised Orthodox or Hasidic and went to a private school and lived in a bubble there is no way he wouldn't have known Christmas carols. He may never have sung them, but he would have been familiar with them. They are everywhere. The movie seemed much more of an UP movie than a Hallmark movie.

Let's have some fun. We all know that we have seen more than enough holiday movies to write our own. So let's write our own! I'm going to start this off by writing one sentence. Please copy that sentence and add your own sentence. Then the next person can copy the previous two sentences and add a sentence. You get the idea. Run-on sentences are allowed. Feel free to jump in anywhere and there's no rule that says you can't add more sentences later in the story. Here goes . . . Holly was a high power executive in a big city, but was originally from a small town called Mistletoe Springs that she hadn't been back to since her father passed four years ago.

Twenty minutes into Write Before Christmas and I had to restart it. I was completely confused. I thought that I had missed the connection among the characters. I had figured out that the military guy was the brother, but I thought that Jessica and Jax had some sort of a relationship. I also thought that Luke worked at the restaurant taking pictures of couples as they were getting engaged since the restaurant was known as the place people went to get engaged.

I just realized something last night. My two all time favorite Hallmark movies, The Nine Lives of Christmas and The Christmas Card star have three out of four stars (Brandon Routh, John Newton, and Alice Evans) who didn't go on to star in other Hallmark movies. The Christmas Card is from 2006 so maybe that's before Hallmark started rotating stars from one move to another movie. I wonder if that's why that's the reason. It doesn't explain Brandon though. I do know that those two movies regularly show up on lists of favorite holiday movies.

I decided to watch a Christmas Movie Christmas on UPtv. It was a really cute premise. Two sisters, one of them a Christmas movie addict, wake up in a Christmas movie. It's filled with all of the tropes - cute grandma, the sisters need to save Christmas, little girls whose father is in the military, cute guy who owns a bakery, Santa who grants wishes, etc. It wasn't as well made as a Hallmark movie, but I was enjoying it until the very end.

I'm trying to figure out what has to happen for me to stop watching this show. I really used to like it but I'm reaching the tipping point of being more annoyed with the characters than enjoying them.

I noticed something about the slice and bake (or whatever they are called) cookies. Everyone used a lot of food coloring. The guy who eventually won (the dog biscuit bakery guy) even used black food coloring on the base of his snow globe. On other cooking shows they always talk about how too much food coloring, especially black, gives food an artificial, chemically flavor. I thought it was weird that no one mentioned that at all. As a matter of a fact, the only time taste in relation to a color was discussed was when the same baker (I can't remember his name) used metalic paint on his centerpiece cookies.

I live in the Boston area and was thinking about where Jorg's bakery was so I could try it out. But he was so horrible that I've decided not to give him my business.