Waxahatchee’s Ivy Tripp was one of the few bright spots in this miserable year, so it’s nice to see that we’re still getting video out of it to remind people or catch anyone who may have missed it back in April. If this describes you or someone you love please make sure to address that omission immediately. Enjoy.

★ Rain had passed or paused before the children had to head out to school. A sodden half-sandwich lay against the curb. Leaves lay right below the trees they’d been knocked down from. While the rain held off, the warmer temperature made things better than the dampness was making them worse. Once the rain started blowing again, that was not the case. Here was November rawness, arriving a day late. It gathered into a firm drizzle, then into an outright shower again for a while. The walk to the homeward subway was rainless, but on the way up out of the stairs, the returning drizzle appeared in the streetlights, several seconds before it landed hard enough to be felt through hair.

by Jane Hu

Near the end of One Direction’s final album Made In The A.M. — in a track titled “History,” no less — the band reaches a note of desperation. During the bridge, Louis Tomlinson (the band’s oldest member, at a whopping twenty-three) lists a catalogue of, for anyone even casually interested in the band, One Direction cliches:

Mini bars, expensive cars, hotel rooms, and new tattoos

And the good champagne, and private planes, but they don’t mean anything

’Cause the truth is out, I realize that without you here life is just a lie

This is not the end

This is not the end

We can make it, you know it, you know

In repetitive and increasingly imploring tones, the bridge short-circuits mid-sentence. Who are they trying to convince about making it, about not the end — the world or themselves? Fredric Jameson was right: history is what hurts. And history happens pretty quickly these days.

Released a couple of weeks ago, the title of Made In The A.M. self-consciously points to its precarious genesis. While also echoing a response to the band’s other albums, Up All Night and Midnight Memories, it occupies, perhaps a little too patly, that liminal space of daybreak — evoking everything from working overtime to waking early, sex to quietly slipping away, too late and too early. The first track opens philosophically: “Hey angel, do you know the reasons why? We look up to the sky?” And the album closes by asking: “Won’t you stay ’til the A.M.?” Hypothetical questions are a good way of framing an album that demands no response or sequel, I guess.

The desire for a second life is perhaps what allows Purpose, Justin Bieber’s latest album, also released a couple of weeks ago, to be much better than Made In The A.M. If One Direction is saying goodbye, then Purpose is making a point of rebranding. While both acts began in the realm of overearnest nineties bubblegum pop (in strikingly similar hairstyles), they have since vastly diverged. These days, One Direction is still trafficking (as it did in its previous two albums) in something like eighties rock meets Coldplay, with occasional hints of Fleetwood Mac — and, in the recent “Walking in the Wind,” Simon & Garfunkel? Bieber has always leaned toward the electronic, but Purpose has taken this tendency to its logical conclusion. ~Bieber’s new sound~ is dancehall meets tropical (sometimes borderline orientalist) house beats meets new age jazz, with periodical callbacks to his evergreen wheelhouse of R&B slow jams. It helps that Bieber is, and has always been, a better singer than the members of One Direction. Even post-puberty, his range is still pretty wack. There are points in Purpose where Bieber sounds almost indistinguishable from the boy who brought us “One Less Lonely Girl” (and “The Feeling”), but for the most part the album sounds like a sonic graduation from My World 2.0 (2010) and Believe (2012).

Boy bands remind us that promises about being first and forever are made to be broken. But the momentary thrill in believing them — because they have not yet been proven false — is a reminder that promises are not necessarily lies just because they don’t come true. Spoiler: none of the promises came true, except maybe those about mistakes. At least one thing that Purpose and Made In The A.M. share is an investment in melancholy and regret.

Never particularly gifted singers — and even worse dancers — One Direction has always known that their trump card is charisma. In their music videos and that baldly titled 3D movie One Direction: This Is Us, the band has never concealed, but has in fact flaunted, their artistic deficiencies. With shit-eating grins, they’d knowingly bust out simple, almost grandfatherly, dance moves. The result? Sheer endearment. In the music video to the extravagantly metatextual “Best Song Ever,” One Direction camps it up to charming effect.

In their exploitation of their underwhelming talent, One Direction’s overwhelming chemistry did not redefine the boy band criterion, so much as remind us of its lasting virility. From the start, One Direction winkingly played up their impetuous boyishness — and primarily by playing off of one another — to supreme effect. There have been nipple twists, ironic holiday sweaters, and romping in fields. Many of their music videos resemble a Merchant Ivory remake of an E.M. Forster novel. And let’s never forget “Larry,” the shipper’s shorthand that launched a thousand pieces of fanfic about Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. If One Direction were an academic monograph, they would be screaming for a chapter on male homosocial desire. Watching them, it’s hard to decide whether they’re singing about each other, or to some implied female viewer. After their first music video, “What Makes You Beautiful,” featuring a single anonymous girl to be shared among the five band members, the group subsequently dropped the girl entirely. You could be explicitly serenading her, but she remains outside of the frame.

Alternately, young Bieber — a one-boy show — compensated by involving crowds of girls to offset his aggressive boyishness. Featured rappers — Ludacris, Sean Kingston, Big Sean, Drake, Nicki Minaj — also did plenty of work in framing J.B. as the relatively complacent, totally cute, boy pop star with a soft edge. For years, Bieber’s catchphrase was, after all, “swaggy.” Oh, and I will never get over Bieber’s face in “Beauty and a Beat” when he’s grinding in a pool next to Nicki Minaj.

Bieber’s manufactured harmlessness was amplified by the facade that the boy didn’t really know, at least sexually, what he was doing. Dating the babyfaced Disney-alum Selena Gomez — who was also an older woman — likely helped with that for awhile as well. Following their break up (which seemed appropriately torturous for someone who was nineteen), Bieber faced a series of misdemeanors which were appropriately volcanic for someone of his age and his public profile. There was the DUI, pot, Xanax, throwing eggs at his Calabasas neighbor’s house, a physical altercation with a minivan driver in Stratford, Ontario, after Bieber hit the minivan, and the excruciating n-word parody of “One Less Lonely Girl.” None of it was close to cute. Luckily for Bieber, cute was becoming less and less of a relevant category in which he could define himself.

Purpose allows Bieber to reposition himself as someone who is truly sorry. He’s not saying goodbye to his franchise — just what it once represented. Produced in the sobering aftermath of a series of scandals, Purpose offers the public a daylight contrition. Bieber’s recessive stance in the album is perhaps illustrated most clearly in the music video to the album’s single “Sorry,” in which we get, yes, a crowd of girls. But this time: no Bieber.

The effect is illuminating in more ways than one, and no less because these visibly liberated female dancers nonetheless offer a placard of forgiveness to the sorry singer himself. On multiple tracks in the album, Bieber closes out songs with a literal spoken apology. These speech acts attempt to relinquish him from guilt and function in the confessional mode: I am aware, so it is okay. Against piano accompaniment, we hear Bieber say at the end of the album’s title track:

I don’t know if this is wrong, because someone else is telling me that it’s wrong. But I feel this so let me just like try my best not to let this happen again. We weren’t necessarily put in the best position to make the best decisions. You can’t be hard on yourself for it, these are the cards you were given so you have to understand that’s not who you are.

The power of confession as a displacement of responsibility is even clearer in the outro to “All In It,” in which Bieber directly appeals to God, who “never disappoints. So I just get my recognition from him, and give him recognition.” These spoken outros — full of orchestrated stutters and rhetorical flourishes (who is the plural “we” here?) — work overtime to dissipate Bieber’s agency in his own actions. They are also implicit apologies; they assume the listener already knows what he’s sorry for. If we can argue that Purpose makes up for Bieber’s imperfect history by being musically exceptional, the lyrical logic of the album — in which we hear Bieber belabour over and over on his past mistakes — ultimately counteracts any impulse to let bygones be bygones. And Bieber should know: The yardstick with which we forgive our artists for being shitheads is long.

In the case of One Direction, however, music can’t redeem them in their last act; it doesn’t even sound like they care if it does or not. After five years of making a lot of promises to girls — and to each other — the band sounds appropriately tired in Made In The A.M. Though, as if clinging to the last lees of adolescence, you feel them periodically trying to rally over the course of the album. In tracks like “Never Enough” and “Temporary Fix,” they evoke the ongoing nostalgia of eighties rock, having entirely given up trying to work in the heterogeneous synth-pop of 2015 where One Direction’s previous pure boypop innocence really no longer fits. Though as per the classic evolution of, well, growing up, maybe the whole point is that we can only believe in such jubilant carefreeness for so long.

Though Bieber might strike listeners as more fatigued, more repentant, this does not mean that One Direction denies musing wistful. “Perfect,” the second single from Made In The A.M., makes this literal. It is a bald acknowledgment of the precariousness underwriting their lives. And insofar as One Direction promises that this instability is a kind of perfection, it is one that becomes self-damning: And if you like cameras flashing every time we go out, oh, yeah / And if you’re looking for someone to write your breakup songs about / Baby, I’m perfect.

As Made In The A.M. aimlessly recedes from its listeners, it plays with our expectations. Are we letting them go — or are they leaving us first? The theater of farewell is encapsulated in “Love You Goodbye” (One Direction’s only song about break-up sex?), as the band repeatedly asks,

Why you’re wearing that to walk out of my life?

Oh, even though it’s over you should stay tonight

If tomorrow you won’t be mine

Won’t you give it to me one last time?

Oh, baby, let me love you goodbye

It’s a goodbye that protests a little too much.

by Paula Duhatschek

1. H.R. Superhero
2. Content Ninja
3. Social Media Gladiator
4. Accounting Samurai
5. Twitter Viking
6. WordPress Leprechaun
7. Sales Wizard
8. Operations Genie
9. Supply Chain Hobgoblin
10. Engineering Leviathan
11. Business Development Soothsayer
12. Data Deity
13. Marketing Oracle
14. Digital Folklorist
15. UI/UX Gargoyle
16. Copywriting Banshee
17. Photography Nymph
18. High Priestess of Search Engine Optimization
19. Financial Hippogriff
20. Public Relations Valkyrie
21. Accounts Payable Subdeacon
22. Administrative Succubus
23. Building Security Demigod
24. Eternal Patriarch of Reception
25. Custodial Grand Master
26. Byronic Courier
27. Coffee Monarch
28. Intern, the Great and Formidable (unpaid)
29. Claims Processing Marvel
31. Clerical Omnipotent
30. Temping Maven
32. Vacuum Virtuoso
33. Shipping Numen
34. Customer Service Maestro
36. Doyen of Fry Cookery
37. Whiz-Bang Cat De-Wormer
38. Casual Labor Guru
39. Wunderkind Washroom Attendant
40. Shipping and Processing Laureate
41. Crackerjack Septic Tank Pump Technician
42. Slack Czar
43. Technology Evangelist
43. Editorial Fellow

Photo by Shutterstock

“Social media participation has been linked to depression, anxiety, and narcissistic behavior, but the reasons haven’t been well-explained. We found envy to be the missing link.”
 — If you find yourself feeling inferior because social media is constantly telling you that everyone else has more fun, makes more money, is advancing further in their career and is loved more deeply or more often than you are, the good news from Science is that you’re not the only loser who worries that way. Maybe if you post more you can fool people into thinking you’re less objectively terrible than you are.

Gosh, this is just eight minutes of pure pretty. If you didn’t have to go outside or do anything or talk to anyone it might just be the opening song on the soundtrack to a perfect day, but God knows you’re not going to be that lucky. Everything that comes after is going to suck in the way that every day seems to suck now. But for these eight minutes it will feel like life is going to be alright, and that’s probably eight minutes more of that feeling than you usually get. Enjoy.

★★★ The blurry clouds overhead and the shriveled leaves in the street were both blowing from east to west. People had their hands jammed in their pockets. A full, long exhalation could conjure, at the very end a little wisp of visible fog. On the way out of the warmth of the bakery, it was only polite and decent to stand aside and let every person enter before claiming the right of way back into the cold. All though the afternoon, the temperature in the office sank. Out in the twilight, with no reservoirs of bodily warmth stored up, the teeth began chattering.

by Dayna Evans

In the car, driving back to New York after a never-ending Thanksgiving holiday, we talked about going to see the Picasso exhibit. “The MoMA is expensive, and I bet it’ll be crowded,” I said. “Want to go to the Museum of Feelings instead? It’s free.”

My friend Cat agreed. “Yeah, let’s do that.” At my feet I had stashed a plastic grocery bag with a boxed panettone, brand name unknown. I pulled it into my lap like a cat to be cradled and tore shreds of the currant bread from its body, as is the November-to-January holiday tradition. I passed one of every four shreds to Cat. This feeling I would describe as presently nostalgic; I would also call it hungry.

We got back to New York in record time, considering the anticipated traffic jam through Staten “Who Gives a Fuck” Island. On the last leg of the trip, I read through several online forums about what would happen to me while I tapered off my meds, which I was doing in response to a friend’s claim that this specific drug obliterated short-term memory. I sent a screengrab of one forum page to my boyfriend, where my future suppressed libido was described. I’d call this feeling playful. By the time I opened my front door, I was satisfied and happy. Two good feelings that never last very long.

After preparing for the cold, sunny winter weather in my apartment, Cat and I embarked on the train ride to the West Side of Manhattan. We hadn’t exactly established what it was we were going to see, and I checked the Facebook event for the address one more time. At that point on Sunday, there were over thirty thousand people who had selected “going” to the Museum of Feelings, and over sixty thousand who had promised they were “interested,” a new choice Facebook had added to take the sting out of a guest list of aloof “maybes.” There were hundreds of comments on the page’s wall, mostly people mentioning their friends with “we should go!” or “After work one night?” I don’t know why, but even then, the luminescent pop-up structure with the digital architectural rendering drew me in. Feelings experienced en masse are a rare phenomenon in New York — though “feels” are now a little more commonplace — and when I’d done some cursory sleuthing, I’d found a few Instagram photos of a pink-purple room a la James Turrell, or for students of the present-future, “Hotline Bling.” If art is supposed to make us feel something, but we have to put trust in Picasso that his sculptures will be evocative enough, why not just cut out the middle man?

At Fulton Street, Cat pointed to Santiago Calatrava’s extravagant venus flytrap transportation hub and then to One World Trade Center; she said that the former Freedom Tower was unremarkable in comparison. We talked about Robert Durst while crossing the West Side Highway to Brookfield Place, the luxe mall where the Museum of Feelings was “popped up,” and looking out over the waterfront, we could see a line of people looping next to the all-white structure.

“Wanna get some food while we wait?” I asked. I drank my third coffee of the day (the tapering allegedly causes fatigue) and we joined the line.

“This better be worth it,” she said. I was feeling optimistic.

There are five “exhibits” in the Museum of Feelings: a room where you refract colorful light from a glittery piece of cardboard; a “Christmas-scented” room where rubber green strings hang from a ceiling (inspiration taken from Jesús Rafael Soto’s work); a disco lounge where the floor is a vibrating animated acid trip; a hall of mirrors with kaleidoscopic images controlled by users swiping a touchscreen; and the Turrell color therapy room where a machine emits a cloud of scented fog for participants to stand in and nearly choke to death. The last one is the most Instagrammable, and while flash photography is not allowed, “social sharing” is greatly encouraged. Before entering each exhibit, “docents” wearing knockoff Chromat structured bodices and pristine Doc Martens invite you to access one of the five senses, and you’re given two cardboard handouts — glitter paper and the 3D glasses.

The Christmas-scented room gagged us with the smell of pine cones, cinnamon, and juniper, and a docent encouraged us to think about the feeling of being young during the holiday season. This was not what being young during the holidays smelled like. “Wait a minute,” Cat said as I grabbed bundles of light-up green rubber into my arms, “What is this?”

“I don’t know, man,” I replied, trying to actually access my childhood feelings of snowy Christmas and furry pajamas, thinking about ham lined with pineapples.

“It’s weird,” Cat said. She frowned at me and moved on.

It takes about fifteen minutes to go from one end of the museum to the other — less time if you’re feeling impatient, more time if you’re feeling trustworthy and child-like. In the kaleidoscope room, Cat captured me in a photograph looking gleeful and idiotic as I swiped around on the touchscreen, making the space around me feel both larger and smaller, larger and smaller.

“I wish I had a room like this in my house,” I told her. She laughed at my excitement, shaking her head incredulously. “I’m serious! This is a cool idea!” We’d waited in line for an hour and fifteen minutes to get into the museum, forced to listen to two drama students from the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts sing through an entire catalog of pop songs from the famed 2010–2015 canon: “Never Say Never” by Justin Bieber, that very successful Shawn Mendes song, and Katy Perry. I needed to release some pent-up energy, but of course I was overcompensating: The small payoff for the long wait had me feeling guilty for having chosen this alleged art over something more “real.” But disappointment isn’t half the feeling that humiliation is.

While waiting in line for the Turrell-inspired room, Cat pointed to a bottle of air freshener laying on the ground. “You see that?” she whispered to me, an eyebrow raised. “Glade air freshener.” I looked to where her finger was pointing, slowly putting the pieces together. Each room did have an overwhelmingly strong smell; and the incitement to share the experience on social media was a little too emphatic.

“This whole place is supposed to get us to buy Glade,” she said, shaking her head again. While we waited, a docent pushed open and closed a curtain. We dutifully stood by, beginning to feel hoodwinked and shallow and stupid. We had waited for such a long time, so it felt stupid to leave now. Wouldn’t we like to see how S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. interpreted the artwork of James Turrell?

Cat started laughing. “You can hear her spraying from an aerosol can in there,” she said. “Sprsss. Sprsss.” We were invited in a moment later. The color pink in the room was distractingly bright, but it managed to calm me down. As soon as the room began to fill with scented fog, which we now knew to be a Glade®‎ experience, we pushed out toward the exit where a “museum store” awaited us. There, attendees could purchase Museum of Feelings candles and share selfies taken on huge, clean-white television screens.

Cat threw her 3D glasses in the trash. I debated keeping mine, at least for a second.

When Drake released his wow-so-memeable-isn’t-he-a-genius video for “Hotline Bling,” James Turrell was of course forced to acknowledge his influence on the video’s set design. “While I am truly flattered to learn that Drake f*cks with me, I nevertheless wish to make clear that neither I nor any of my woes was involved in any way in the making of the ‘Hotline Bling’ video,” Turrell wrote in a statement released by his lawyer. The Canadian rapper’s love affair with Turell had been tracked over time and there was no escaping where the video’s influence came from. Game recognize game, I suppose.

That the Museum of Feelings pop-up launched only a week before the opening of this year’s Art Basel Miami is very funny to me. In my “social feed,” I’ve seen previews of what Art Basel will offer this year, I’ve gotten invitations to parties and openings based on gallery listservs I didn’t know I was subscribed to, I recognize some artist’s names because those are the names that are talked about. I wonder about the cycle of being a respected artist because you’re talked about and talked about because you’re a respected artist, and who deigns a crossing of this threshold. Why hasn’t Banksy retired yet? Why do we need another exhaustive evaluation of Monet’s water lilies?

From the tiny screens of my computer and phone, art looks mostly dull, flat, and familiar, especially when it arrives via jpeg or tinyletter or Tumblr scroll. Only a few weeks before I first heard about the Museum of Feelings, I had ordered a new Rizzoli art book called Feelings: Soft Art, a collection of works by contemporary artists that explore the evocative emotions drawn out by visual art. In many ways, this book is drastically different from what the Museum of Feelings attempts to accomplish — which is, make millennials think Glade airspray is trendy and aware and worthy of use — but in some ways, it is not. When Cat and I tried to figure out how it was we even came to learn about the pop-up museum, we both realized that a lot of our more “arty” friends had said they were attending the Facebook event. It spread virally. We trusted those people’s tastes, so we decided to go. We never really thought to check if it was worthy of praise, or even exactly what it was.

This is the same principle by which the casual museum attendee learns to namedrop Cézanne and Miró. MoMA is just as much sponsored content as the Museum of Feelings — they’re just sponsored by different power structures.

On the way home, we were both feeling dejected. I turned to Cat, who was walking slowly behind me, and asked if she wanted to hear a fucked up story. She said yes, so I spun a lengthy yarn about a how few weeks ago I came back to my neighborhood to learn that a woman had jumped in front of the train at my subway stop. There were many graphic details — all true — and I told the story with animated hands and in several parts. I was sharing something with a friend, like shorn scraps from the body of a panettone loaf. I wanted her to feel what I had felt.

“What the hell,” Cat said when I had finished explaining what had happened and was waiting for her response. “I thought you said you were going to tell me a funny story.”

“Oh,” I responded. “No, I said fucked up.” Don’t you feel it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference?

Huh. @BabyCenter says many of Instagram’s filter names are gaining in popularity as baby names.

 — @KatieBoehret

1. Normal

2. Hefe

3. Kelvin

4. Slumber

As in, Slumber is survived by her daughter, Normal, and her two grandchildren, Henry and Mary.

5. Crema

6. Helena

7. Toaster

8. Sutro

As in, Sutro’s rise to political power is not unprecedented: A pre-war presidential candidate named Donald Trump rode a similar wave of populist rage to his party’s nomination in 2016.

9. Clarendon

10. X-Pro II

11. Moon

As in, Moon is a writer living outside the wall. You can follow her work here.

12. 1977

13. Reyes

14. Amaro

15. Lo-Fi

As in, As a teacher, I’m not able to make this recommendation myself, but I would suggest you talk to your doctor about possible medications to, just, keep Lo-Fi focused in class. He’s a very promising student. Great potential. Yes, I agree, you’ve done a great job. No, you’re right. I’d just hate to see him get off track at such a young age.

16. Perpetua

17. Dogpatch

18. Mayfair

As in, Mayfair says, despite the familiar app-cute circumstances, that her relationship with Dogpatch is anything but conventional. “At first, our parents were like ‘what? lol.’ But then, after we watched some videos together, they were like, ‘k.’”

19. Rise

20. Lux

21. Valencia

22. Willow

As in, Willow joins us from our Seattle office.

23. Sierra

24. Ludwig

As in, The shooter, known to his small circle of friends as Ludwig, was described as a ‘gentle loner’ who ‘kept to himself.’

25. Charmes

26. Inkwell

27. Aden

As in, Sadly, we have parted ways with Aden. The board wishes him well!

28. Nashville

As in, Nashville, the youngest son of the Inkwells, a prominent Ridgewood family…

29. Earlybird

30. Brannan

31. Juno

32. Lark

As in, Actually, his name is Lark. And we’re in love.

33. Vesper

As in, Vesper’s meltdown demonstrates what our grandparents’ generation of feminists always knew: Thirsty Male Allies are garbage trash.

34. Maven

35. Skyline

36. Ginza

37. Brooklyn

As in, “Brooklyn’s journey through the wilds of e-commerce to fulfillment as an evangelical pastor is as unlikely as it gets. Or is it the likeliest of all? A necessary read for anyone who cares about living a full life.” — Ashby Gingham

38. Gingham

39. Ashby

40. Hudson

41. Stinson

As in, “Retro baby names are on the rise in ’67, with a strong showing from internet-chic names like ‘Stinson’ and ‘Hudson,’” says BabyCenter marketing director Walden X-Pro II

42. Walden

by Janet Potter

Lifetime Christmas movies take place in a magical universe full of perfect single men where everyone turns their Christmas decorations up to eleven, and every small town has an eatery called Millie’s or Dinky’s or Flopsy’s or Boopy’s that’s “famous” for a food that’s perfectly easy to make well, like pancakes or coffee. The women in Lifetime Christmas movies haven’t found love, and there is always one person in their life standing by to give them aggressive advice in the vein of “there’s a single man over there, he’s your only chance at happiness, or I fear you will die alone at the age of thirty-two.” The men are handsome, sensitive, and family-oriented, their unavailability due only to an easily surmountable circumstance — an ill-suited girlfriend, a grief process that’s almost over, or the fact that they’re a ghost.

The perfect single man and the very lonely woman quickly fall in love (magical Christmas relationships generally take between two days and two weeks to form) against the backdrop of adorable small town Christmas festivities and a small human interest project, like saving a reindeer farm. A Lifetime Christmas movie is a convoluted and unrealistic and saccharine and completely wonderful thing, and this year Lifetime is premiering seven new ones to run throughout the holiday season.

A Gift Wrapped Christmas — November 28th

The perfect single man in this movie is still getting over his wife’s death, and has a girlfriend who only speaks in corporate jargon. He hires Gwen, a perky blond number doing a straight up Kate Hudson impression (although it kind of works and she’s charming), as his personal shopper, and she oversteps her professional bounds on a daily basis until he realizes he’s in love with her. This is the first of two movies in which two people sing a full-length Christmas carol while looking into each other’s eyes as everybody else in the room watches in silent admiration, and this is treated as romantic and fun.

Worst example of problem-solving: When Gwen’s car breaks down at one point, she leaves it on the side of the road without even a peek under the hood, giving no thought to calling professional help before starting a multi-hour journey on foot.

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Gwen’s perfect older sister, played by the perfect little sister from 7th Heaven.

The naughty list: Gwen’s outfit at the beginning of the movie.

The nice list: The guy who plays Gwen’s brother-in-law is legit funny.

Watch? Yes

The Christmas Gift — Sunday, November 29th

The perfect single man in this movie runs a group home for foster children. When he was a perfect single child, he sent anonymous Christmas gifts to random kids, and one of those kids grew up to be Michelle Trachtenberg. She’s a journalist with unnecessarily good diction whose career is on the rocks. She decides to save it by writing a story about the kid who sent her a blank journal for Christmas twenty years before. Their first interview is in a bar and she shows up in a cocktail dress, which is not how journalism usually works.

Realities glossed over: Every detail of how the foster system works.

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Trachtenberg’s editor, played by the eternally handsome Rick Fox. Their relationship is very unprofessional.

The naughty list: Nothing about this movie makes sense. Trachtenberg, who I honestly thought was amazing in Gossip Girl, says all her lines at half speed. Everybody’s personality and motivation changes every five minutes.

The nice list: Even though it was the worst of this year’s crop, there is a short, sweet moment with a war veteran that made me cry.

Watch? No

The Flight Before Christmas — Saturday, December 5th

The perfect single man in this movie is Ryan McPartlin, the meathead from Chuck, who spends the movie looking bananas handsome. He finds himself sitting next to Mayim Bialik on a plane, and boy do they hate each other instantly, but their plane is grounded in Bozeman, Montana, and they’re forced to stay in a B&B together for a few days. They have exactly one conversation, in which she talks about how many failed relationships she’s had and how she’ll probably die alone, and he talks about how relationships are just really, really, really, really hard work and working hard is what love is. They have this conversation six times in six different settings and then they are in love. Does Ryan McParlin walk out of the bathroom with a towel very loosely held at his waist? Yes.

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Reginald VelJohnson and Jo Marie Payton, who played the Winslow parents in Family Matters, own the Montana B&B, and they are a riot.

The naughty list: As the town’s dance contest is starting, the judge says: “Remember, the only rule is to have fun!” which is all well and good, but a bad way to run a dance contest.

The nice list: Every time Ryan McPartlin smiles an angel get its wings.

Watch? Yes

Last Chance For Christmas — Sunday, December 6th

The perfect single man in this movie is John, one of Santa’s reindeer handlers. Prancer has a hoof fracture and John has to go to a reindeer ranch in Alaska, owned by a feisty single mom named Annie, to find a replacement in time for Christmas. Will he convince her to lend him a reindeer, and also fall in love with him, in time to save Christmas? Who cares, because this movie is genuinely funny and charming, and made me laugh many times. There is a subplot involving a grown man who is obsessed with sleds, and you’re like, What? Is there seriously a Citizen Kane joke in this Lifetime Christmas movie I’m watching? Ten out of ten, would recommend.

Best line: “I work for Santa and it’s not weird!”

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Mrs. Claus

The naughty list: Delivering presents all over the world takes one night, but the elves say if they’re down one reindeer it will take three-to-four months. What?

The nice list: Annie’s got that no-nonsense, lives-in-a-harsh-climate, Janine Turner from Northern Exposure vibe. I want to be her friend.

Watch? Yes

Becoming Santa — Saturday, December 12th

The perfect single man in this movie is a toy designer. He proposes to his girlfriend Holly at her parents’ house, not knowing that her parents are literally Santa and Mrs. Claus, that he is at the North Pole, and that if they get married he’ll become Santa Claus one day. This is the second of two movies in which two people sing a full-length Christmas carol while looking into each other’s eyes, everybody else in the room watches in silent admiration, and this is treated as romantic and fun. Some tests the Clauses give the perfect single man to see if he’d be a good Santa Claus: Eating dozens of cookies in one sitting, sneaking around a room without waking anyone up, sliding down a chimney.

Most confusing character to look at: Holly’s ex-boyfriend, Jack Frost, wears Timberlands, pastel sweaters tied around his shoulders, and has shoulder-length silver hair.

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Santa and Mrs. Claus, played by Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter from Family Ties.

The naughty list: Santa’s fat suit looks like it was made out of throw pillows and saran wrap.

The nice list: Holly Claus’s lipstick throughout.

Watch? No

Wish Upon a Christmas — Sunday, December 13th

The perfect single man in this movie is a widowered father who runs a Christmas ornament company that’s been in his family for generations and means a lot to them. Don’t worry if you forget that last fact, he’ll bring it up again in four minutes. The company is in financial trouble, and Amelia, a corporate consultant who happens to be his high school girlfriend, comes to town to trim the fat. Maybe the company would be in less financial trouble if their Christmas party wasn’t fancier than most weddings, and didn’t have a live band and didn’t end with a tree-lighting ceremony.

How far away the perfect single man’s son is the first time he kisses Amelia: Two feet.

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: Amelia’s dad, Alan Thicke!

The naughty list: The employees of the Christmas ornament company work in a tiny, overly decorated room, and hum in unison.

The nice list: Amelia is played by Bianca from 10 Things I Hate About You, which was my favorite movie in high school.

Watch? No

The Spirit of Christmas

— Saturday, December 19th

The perfect single man in this movie, Daniel, was murdered on December 13th, 1890. Every year on the anniversary of his death he takes human form and lives in his old house, which is now an inn, for twelve days. (In his eighteen nineties beard and suspenders, he does not look a bit out of place in 2015.) Kate is a lawyer trying to sell the inn, and decides to help him solve the mystery of his death so he can move on to the afterlife.

Best line: “This is shaping up to be the worst Christmas since I died.”

Who’s giving out the aggressive advice: The manager of the inn, who’s all like, “You guys are perfect together, go for it! Who cares that you’re alive and he’s the living dead? Work it out!”

The naughty list: It’s inconceivable that he didn’t solve his own murder in the ninety-five years before Kate comes along.

The nice list: The leather gloves that Daniel is wearing in the final scene are so gorgeous that I shouted at the television.

Watch? Yes