Hallmark holidays

I was surfing through my 2,000 TV channels the other day trying to find something mindlessly different to watch because I wasn't in the mood for critical thinking. We'd just finished with the presidential elections, which proved to me at least half of the nation wasn't into critical thinking, either.

Kim was on the phone with a relative so I knew I had at least 90 minutes of my own.

I made my way through several offerings until I came across the Hallmark Channel. It doesn't get any more mindless than that, so I stopped surfing. I'd already missed the first half hour or so of this particular Christmas flick, but I stopped because one of the actresses, Danica McKellar, had a vaguely familiar face.

Just at that moment, Kim walked in and sat down. She was  89 minutes earlier that I expected and I was halfway embarrassed because, you know, I was watching a Hallmark movie, Crown for Christmas, and not Field of Dreams or Saving Private Ryan or even It's a Wonderful Life.

"Who's that?" asked Kim when McKellar's face came on the screen. "She looks familiar."

So I Googled Danica McKellar. It turns out that she was Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years back in the late 1980s and early 90s.

"Winnie! It's Winnie!"

My Google research told me that she was something of a math wizard, having published several best-selling children's books on mathematics, specifically targeting young girls to help build their confidence.

My mind immediately drifted to Mayim Bailik, who played Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. Bailik has a PhD in neuroscience.

And then there's Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen, who earned his doctorate in astrophysics from Imperial College in London 33 years after he first applied. It took him that long because, you know, he was busy touring the world. Stars with other lives, who knew? We will rock you, indeed.

Anyway, back to Hallmark.

As much as we enjoyed watching Winnie, Hallmark's hallmark production values kept getting in the way. At least it did for me.

"All the Hallmark movies are the same," I told Kim. "It's about either a bookstore or bakery or bed and breakfast that is in financial trouble. A beautiful female CEO who recently lost her job or who is an author with writer's block somehow gets involved with the handsome owner of the failing business in an effort to help. He's usually a widower with a precocious child (never more than one kid, though). They fall in love in spite of themselves and seal the deal with a long anticipated kiss in the final 60 seconds of the movie."

Most of these movies are filmed in Canada, I think, and there's always a dusting of snow which makes everything look like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card. You want to live there because everybody is so happy and helpful, which really doesn't explain why the bookstore or bakery are failing in the first place.

I'm already revealing too much about myself here.

I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said for mindlessness. Then again, I guess I'm grateful there's 1,999 other channels to choose from.