22nd Annual A Home for the Holidays (Dave Thomas Foundation, CBS-TV, aired December 20, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Garth Brooks-Trisha Yearwood holiday special CBS-TV followed it up with what was billed as the 22nd anniversary of A Home for the Holidays. I remember encountering some of the earliest shows in this annual series and being astonished at the whole concept of the program -- an infomercial for adoption. There were plenty of happy couples featured with their new kids, and at least two whose adoptions were officially finalized on camera -- including one of those my-how-far-we’ve-come moments in that one of the adopting couples featured were two legally married Gay men, Carl and Jesse, who’ve adopted two-year-old Nicholas Watkins after his natural parents, both drug users, were busted and sentenced to prison. Niucholas’s great joy in life, besides his two dads, is playing superhero -- which reminded me that, after all, Superman was adopted too. (In fact he was what the producers of the show called a “foster adoption” -- one in which the adopting family first took in the kid as a foster child and then decided they wanted to keep him and make him legally their own.) There was also a segment about a Black couple -- the wife looked quite a bit like Georgia activist and politician Stacey Abrams -- who adopted a pair of twins and then two years later got offered another baby from the same birth mother -- which made me wonder why she keeps cranking them out if she doesn’t want them.

With all the heartwarming stories about newly created families and all the love and joy adoptive kids can bring (no, thank you; I think I’m wretchedly unsuited to parenthood and the powers that be in the universe knew what they were doing when they made me Gay), there was time for ony eight songs: Josh Groban did “Celebrate Me Home” and “Angels” -- nice modern-day pop songs, though I wondered why everyone in Groban’s backup band looked about twice his age. Miranda Lambert did a beautiful rendition of her song “Bluebird” and Andrea Bocelli sang something called “I Believe” -- blessedly not the horrid piece of rancid cheese by that title Frankie Laine ill-advisedly recorded in 1953 (the year I was born!) but almost as banal, and while Bocelli once had a nice voice and could do a fairly credible stab at opera, now it’s surprisingly ragged and barely able to negotiate pop. Leslie Odom, Jr. -- who had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show doing an uncannily exact replica of Johnny Mathis’s first Christmas album on “O Holy Night” -- did two songs here, “Heaven and Earth” and “Snow,” and sung the latter in one of the most bizarre outfits I’ve ever seen. It was two-toned, half light blue and half brown, but the split was done vertically so his right side was dressed in blue and his left side in brown. (I can imagine the tailor who was hired to make this costume asking whoever commissioned it, “You want what?”) Megan Trainor, whose waist-length hair made her look like the bride of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, did a nice version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” that mixed pop, jazz and country. The finale was the ensemble cast rockin’ out to a version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” pretty obviously ripped off from the one on Phil Spector’s Christmas album. The whole concept of A Home for the Holidays is obviously designed for people far more sentimental than I -- though I give points for including a Gay couple in a program produced by a foundation headed and funded by Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, where my husband Charles doesn’t want me to eat because Thomas supposedly was a major contributor to Donald Trump’s campaign.