Slim Tinsel is required by Internet Law to produce a holiday listicle. Otherwise Russian hackers flood your site with topless Putin photos and the Justice Department tries to photoshop your head into pictures with Jeffrey Espstein. This ain’t no garden party, brother.1
So, what to list? The obvious answer: Women in Christmas Movies Power Rankings, or WCMPR.2 After exhaustive research and the consumption of an entire bowl of eggnog,3 we list.
No. 1 with a Bullet: Donna Reed, It’s a Wonderful Life. Do we really even need to discuss this? The Rant’s knees still go weak every time the camera turns on Donna for the first time at the graduation dance. In real life, Reed protested the Vietnam War and worked as a peace activist. A wonderful life indeed.
2. Miss Piggy, A Muppet Christmas Carol. Miss Piggy gets to show off her acting chops (thank you, I’ll be here all week) as Mrs. Cratchit, and holds her own with Michael Caine as Scrooge, who probably made twelve other movies simultaneously with this one.
3. Carol Kane, Scrooged. This movie climbed its way to a cult classic because of the presence of Bill Murray, but Kane steals the show as the Ghost of Christmas Present, as she literally tries to pound some sense into Murray’s Scrooge.
4. Lucy, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Critics breathlessly point out Lucy’s presence in Peanuts as a shadow reality for Charles Schulz’s troubled marriage to his first wife. But Lucy was a Grrrrrl long before anyone had even conceived of the pop-culture type. Let’s just say Lucy would have been our first two-term woman president.
5. Melinda Dillon, A Christmas Story. The Best Mom Ever navigates a crotchety husband, an erotic lamp, needy children, and a demonic furnace without complaint. When she covers for Ralphie after his fight with Farkus, we love her all over again.
Our contractual duties have been fulfilled. And if things get sideways with the in-laws, remember the Willet. We have a case cooling its heels in the trunk.
- Slim assumes since both Ric Flair and John Cena have now “retired” from professional wrestling they’ll be showing up to break a chair over someone’s head at every pay-per-view event for all of eternity while the announcers express their utter shock at the proceedings. We can’t wait. Since the NIH is just sitting around trying to throw paper clips into unused beakers, let’s get them to work on cloning Macho Man Randy Savage. Now that’s science, brother. Oh yeah.
- The WCMPR can also be employed to determine the college football playoff field. The results wouldn’t be any more nonsense than the current system, and Slim would enjoy Pat McAfee explaining how Alabama matches up against Ellen Griswold
- Both of those are lies. We did less research than Pam Bondi preparing an indictment, and The Rant has been consuming Santa’s greatest gift of all, Willet Rye, which we feared would never make its way to the Home Offices, but has appeared like a Channing Tatum movie cameo, surprising and delightful
