25 Days of Hallmark Movies, Day 19: "Reunited At Christmas"

"Reunited At Christmas" could be considered a "grown up" Hallmark movie. No vapid flirtations or wacky misunderstandings. This one's about real life issues of grown children of divorced parents, about how you're never really ready to make major life decisions, and the importance of emotional honesty and communication with those you love.

Sounds refreshingly mature? Maybe. Sounds boring? That, too.

Romance Factor: 10 out of 10

Christmas Cheer: 6 out of 10

Overall Rating: 8 out of 10

Time Until First Kiss: 00:18:24

Something I've Noticed And A Possible Theory

If you've been Christmas shopping lately, you might have noticed a certain pattern of speech in a lot of retail windows.




It seems like a bunch of places are no longer using complete, coherent sentences and instead just throwing words like "Joy" or "Merry" or "Give" together.






My theory about this new practice goes like this: retailers shied away from saying "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" because they don't want to alienate anybody. But they also feel like saying "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" is too common or pedestrian– something your local muffler shop would say– so they invent new expressions, using seasonal keywords to conjure up "SHARE DELIGHT" or "UNWRAP ENCHANTMENT" or some other new age-y nondenominational horseshit that doesn't mean anything.

Racist Furnace?

I got some junk mail from PSE&G the other day, and this guy was in the envelope:


To you faithful EADJ readers(ha!), you might recognize this sassy furnace from "Racist Appliances," one of our regular features.


We're still undecided whether we want to convert this into a new segment, "Relaxed Racist Furnace," but we'll let you know if it pans out.