Rachelle Hampton

Dan McQuaid runs our merch store, which you can find at normalgossip.store. Tara Jacoby designed our show art, thanks to the rest of the Defector staff. Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber-based media company. Normal Gossip is a proud member of Radiotopia. I am your host, Rachel Hampton. And remember, you did not hear this from me.

Hi, Rachel Hampton here. If you missed last week's episode of Normal Gossip, please go back and listen because, spoiler alert, I have been crowned America's Next Top Gossip Queen. I wanted to say a very, very heartfelt thank you to all the listeners who have been so generous and so excited about the next phase of this show that we all love so much.

We here at the Normal Gossip Team really appreciate it. So much so that we thought maybe y'all might like to have a little holiday bonus episode as a treat. Before we get to your present, though, I just wanted to say that I am so, so, so, so, so excited to start working on season eight of Normal Gossip, which will come out this spring. But I need your help. We are looking for gossip.

You can email us at normalgossip at defector.com or you can leave us a voicemail on our hotline at 2679-GOSSIP. Some gossip that I am dying to receive, real estate gossip, gossip that is secretly a romance novel, service industry gossip, and fandom gossip, but truly anything you have that you think might be a fit, please send it over. If you have ever in your life thought,

Maybe the story might work for normal gossip. Send it, please. I will work with you on anonymization. And if it turns out to be too hard to anonymize, well, I still want to read it. Okay, now for your present. As many of y'all know, we put out an extra episode for our subscribers once a month. For December's episode, we tried something just a little bit different.

I made Kelsey watch the 2015 Lifetime original movie, The Spirit of Christmas. And we just gabbed about it for an hour. As literally anyone in my life will tell you, I'm obsessed with this movie. And I think it might haunt Kelsey forever. What more could you want? Happy holidays.

It came out in 2015. You've had a decade.

This movie has been in my life for at least the past four years, minimum, possibly more than that. What I think happened is, do you remember back around like 2017 when BuzzFeed would do big lists of like the craziest Christmas movies you should watch? Oh, yeah, yeah. I think this was on there. And I think that at the time, this movie was on Netflix. And so I was like, okay, cool.

I don't have to buy anything. I'll watch this movie. And then I watched it with my roommate at the time. And I was immediately obsessed. And then every single year, I brought this movie up to other friends being like, have you seen The Spirit of Christmas? And they're obviously like, no. What the fuck is that?

So it has become an annual tradition where every single year, I force at least one of my friends to watch this movie with me. And this year, it's me.

And the thing is, both of those are annual traditions for me. I reread Giovanni's Room every single year around this time. And I also watch this movie every single year. So you're really hitting the Rachel Hampton annual tradition.

Beautiful. I really want to hear your thoughts, but I feel like we should do a brief recap of what happens in this movie.

This is a recap pod now. So we open. Let's start with that opening scene. Yes. All right. So it's snowy. It's clearly like what fucking Michigan or something. I don't know.

No, not at all.

And he also has that haircut that now is a little fashy, but in 2015 was the hipster haircut. Yep. And the outfit that he's wearing... Which is like this vest with a little shirt under it and boots is giving Williamsburg hipster. Yeah. Like, so it's really confusing as to where we are in time. But I'm buckled the fuck in.

It is. It really, it keeps you guessing. It keeps the girlies on their feet. And speaking of girlies, we have to talk about our main girlie of this movie, whose name is Kate. Kate. Kate. And Kate, Kate's a lawyer. And lawyering is her entire life. Yeah. In the first scene where we're introduced to her. This scene rules, to be honest. I love this scene. It's such a good scene. She's at dinner.

She's talking to this guy. And he's like, you know, you're really great. You're so ambitious. But like, I just feel like something's missing. And she's like, yeah. Yeah. So true. Everyone I date knows nothing about me. My ex called me his ghost girl. And then at the end, she's like, can I have your dessert? And she takes this creme brulee and she's like, yeah, I didn't want to be here anyways.

Yes.

Yeah. So she drives her Jeep Cherokee out to this huge house and it's beautiful. Also, this movie is supposed to take place like somewhere in snowy United States.

Same. Speaking of James Baldwin, I have been reading Another Country. We've both been reading Another Country. And there's a scene that takes place right around near Thanksgiving. And the character is thinking about, oh, it's snowing again. It's all on the ground. It's cold. It's cold. And they're like, we're leading up to Thanksgiving. And I read that and just like...