Directed by David DeCoteau. With Tara Reid, Ingo Rademacher, Mira Furlan, Haley Pullos. Dateless for the Christmas ball, 39-year-old bachelor, King Charles of Baltania, tracks down his American college sweetheart, only to discover Allison has never been married, yet raised a 17-year-old daughter, Lily, who mathematically might be Charles’ biological princess.
I didn’t think there could be a worse Hallmark Christmas movie than the one saw yesterday. This was an order of magnitude worse.
It did have an interesting Christmas tradition of creating a custom ornament each year to commemorate the year much like the Lakota winter counts. I’ve seen references to these types of decorations before, but it’s rare to see them represented as a recurring thing.
Baltania, what a great name for a generic non-existent European country.
The animated gilded book page turning and sparkles with voice overs were appallingly bad. I think that almost every bit of footage they shot for the film got used twice. The production value was atrocious. The casting was painfully drunk. The green screen work was pure misery and I’m fairly certain a 9 year old could do a better job using Zoom right now.
Some indigenous American tribes kept annual winter counts which served as both a physical historical account of their year, but served as visual mnemonic devices leveraging a bit of the idea of a drawn memory palace along with spaced repetition by adding a new image to their “journey” each year.
I was reminded about the idea over the weekend by a dreadful, cheeseball Hallmark Holiday movie A Royal Christmas Ball (2017) (please don’t torture yourself by watching it). The two main characters had a Christmas ritual of creating a holiday ornament every year for their Christmas tree with a design that represented something significant in their lives that year. Because most families generally use and reuse the same ornaments every year, the practice becomes a repeated ritual which allows them to reminisce over each ornament every year to remember past years. It’s a common occurrence (at least in Western society) for people to purchase souvenir ornaments when they travel, and these serve the same effect of remembering their past travels.
If others haven’t come across this idea as a fun mnemonic device for the whole family with built in spaced repetition, I recommend you give it a try. Just don’t everyone necessarily make coronavirus ornaments for this year.
Non-Christians could leverage a similar idea for their annual holidays, feasts, or events if they like. Of course, you could follow the Lakota tribe and make a more traditional winter count.
For those interested in some of the further history and description of the idea of an annual count in the framing of mnemotechny, I would recommend LynneKelly’s book Memory Craft or some of her more academic works.
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