christmas in connecticut

December 16 movie: Christmas in Connecticut. My other favorite Christmas movie! Barbara Stanwyck plays the lifestyle queen of ladies magazines, whose publisher bullies her into inviting a war hero home to her farm in Connecticut for Christmas dinner. Only problem is, she's a fraud who isn't married, has no baby, no farm in Connecticut, and can't even cook. The movie is hilarious. I only have one problem with it: throughout the movie she seems largely unfamiliar with her own story. Her readers seem to know much more about the content of her columns than she does. The charitable explanation (which I try hard to believe while I'm watching the movie) is that she's so flustered by the situation and her growing infatuation with the war hero that she can't remember anything. The uncharitable explanation is that she wasn't creating a persona in all those columns; she was just making shit up and writing down whatever came to mind. Still, you'd think that knowing she was going to have to live out the character from her column, she would have spent a little time familiarizing herself with the material.