Headline: The Christmas Tapes

Christmas comes but once a year, which is a good thing considering how long it takes to recover from the holiday movies.

They're hard to ignore-Hollywood turns out a couple more every year, and the video stores hype last year's fare. On the tube, you can catch everything from Babes in Toyland to Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! I keep meaning to catch that one, but it's often playing at the same time as A Very Brady Christmas, and I've always had a thing for Jan.

If you're a channel surfer and you don't care for Yuletide flicks, these are hard times. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an active surfer will come across It's A Wonderful Life so many times that it probably adds up to seeing the whole movie, even if it does come in random three second samplings.

There are ways to screen your television choices to exclude adult content, but there's no S chip to block Santa films.

I usually catch a few holiday movies every year. At the very least I'll see Davis family favorite A Christmas Story, and one of the many permutations of A Christmas Carol, and something weird like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (with child star Pia Zadora).

By the time Christmas itself rolls around, it gets pretty hard to imagine watching another Christmas movie.

Yet this is exactly when millions of presents will be unwrapped to reveal… a Christmas movie!

Yes, you too are in danger of receiving your own copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. If you were really interested in the movie, it's likely you just rented it a week before. Perhaps you watched it several times before returning it.

If the person who gave you the gift is in holiday attendance, you may be required to watch it again just to prove how thankful you are. By this time, you may reach that oversaturation point where you will never willingly watch the damn movie again.

But you own it, so you have to put it somewhere. If you are one of the millions of people who don't own your own videos, storage can be a real problem. Where do you put a collection of one?

Unless you live way out in the boonies, I can't understand watching a movie so often that it makes sense for you to own it. There are so many films out there to see, and renting is so cheap and easy, why clutter up the living room with ugly videotapes?

At this point, you're probably thinking "This guy obviously doesn't have kids," and you're right. In fact, this is why I don't have kids.

I have this natural aversion to repetition. I'd rather seek new experiences than relive old ones. I have a friend with a couple of kids, and for a while every time I visited, the kids were watching Men in Black. It's a good movie that bears a repeat viewing, but I bet they saw that movie more times than the people who edited it. Will Smith may have forgotten his lines by now, but those kids never will, and neither will their mother.

At any given cocktail party, you can always take a quick head count of parents by mentioning The Lion King. The ones who start to twitch and gulp their drinks are the parents.

Christmas shopping can be hard. When desperation sets in regarding finding something for Uncle Dave, the most difficult person in the world to shop for, that video store can look pretty tempting. He likes movies.

Get him a gift certificate from the Nick or Westside Video. After a season on the couch flipping between Ernest Saves Christmas and Jack Frost, he could probably use some air.