Red Christmas Truck

 People are starting to put their Christmas decorations out.  It's that time of year.  I haven't participated in a while, so I was curious to see what it's like.  Over and over again, I saw these old red pickup trucks with a Christmas tree in the back.  I know the Christmas story backward and forwards from both the Christian and the pagan traditions, and I never heard of this red pickup truck business.

So, I looked it up.  It's easy to do these days.  You don't need a library.  The Red Christmas Truck motif is entirely a product of and a meme in numerous Hallmark Christmas Specials.  Because nobody is better at marketing the holidays than Hallmark, even before they had their own cable channel, Hallmark's red pickup trucks were adorned on thousands of commercially available Christmas products, and since people saw them in the stores, they assumed they were a legitimate part of Christmas even if they never saw any of the movies.

While there are many men who make Hallmark movies, there are very, very few men who watch them unless they're trying to appease or attract some woman who watches them.  I've seen enough of them to know that they have basically a single plot that's redressed a thousand different ways.

A girl.  A pretty girl.  A successful pretty girl has to move back to her hometown because she got fired or has to take care of her sick mother or she got sick of her job, or her relationship with her very successful boyfriend, who also happens to be her boss soured, so, she went home.

Fully ninety percent of these movies star Lacy Chabert, so home town for Lacy is Purvis, Mississippi, which she hasn't seen since Cliff Finch was governor, but this is fiction right.  So the pretty girl moves home and at the hardware store, or the grocery store, or she gets a flat tire, or her mom's dog jumps over the fence, and she meets this guy she slept with once in high school but rejected because he wasn't ambitious enough before the moved to the big city and started dating Mister Ambitious.  Mister Ambitious is usually an asshole.  Not a real asshole who beats her or takes her money, but a TV asshole who "doesn't understand her."

So that's the plot.  The rest of the movie is trying to get Lacy Chabert to realize she loves the high school guy, who somehow made a billion dollars even though he wasn't ambitious, and gives Mister Ambitious, who's been putting up with her shit this whole time, the air.  Not the finger, just the air and maybe a note that says, "thanks for the years you were devoted to me; I'm gonna run away with this guy I haven't seen in twenty years now.  Oh, thanks for paying for my nose job.  Love, Lacy."  All of this happens after Mister No Ambition shows up at her mom's house with a live Christmas tree in the back of the Red Pickup Truck he had in high school (the one they had sex in that one time).  The end.

I'm not sure I'm all too interested in that complicated hoo-ha becoming part of the Christmas story.  Who am I to judge, though?  We already put mistletoe over the doors, which carries some of the most potent pagan fertility magic despite being poison.  I'm not sure why women want some dude who's been faithful to get the shaft in their romantic fiction, but you don't even wanna know what happens to women in men's fiction.

Either way, I'll learn to accept it like I do elves and reindeer and mistletoe and snowflakes and some guy named Santa and a million other things that aren't part of the Christmas story at all.  Might as well.  Early Christians never really gave a second thought to Christmas until they decided to try and convert a bunch of pagans who celebrated winter solstice with yule logs and the occasional human sacrifice.