Sometime early last year I received a cable TV bill that made my eyes bulge and my heart race (Apparently this is not a rare occurance, as the same thing happened recently when I looked at my cellphone bill. But more on that later!).
Our 6-month promotion had ended and the REAL price of the TV service hit our home. To the tune of $120. I just couldn’t fathom that. We weren’t even getting ALL the channels! This was excluding HDTV, Cinemax, Starz, Playboy, the Sports package, the music channels, XM Radio, etc etc. We had just regular channels (about 80) and Showtime/HBO (which they threw in “for free” for 6 months).
My then-fiance/now-husband and I weren’t watching anything worth paying $120 for. So we talked about it and decided to cancel it. Now we pay the same company $42 for a crappy internet connection instead–we are looking into swapping this out as well, since we’re on another one of those 6-month promotions.
Enter Netflix. For $7.99/mo, we would be able to stream an array of movies, TV shows, and other random oddities to our home. This didn’t, of course, cater well to our dirty little secret (Jersey Shore), so we now watch the full episodes on the MTV website (did you know: you can watch the full episodes of most popular, mainstream TV shows the day after it airs for the folks who do pay for TV service? Anything on TLC, FoodNetwork, HGTV and MTV included!).
Since I’m too cheap to pay the extra $5 to subscribe to DVD rentals through Netflix, I don’t get to watch many of the more recent films unless they are flops. And I also don’t get to watch any of the really well-known, well-watched older movies either.
Which brings me to this post: What I really miss about cable TV… Christmas movies. Can you believe that I didn’t watch a single Christmas movie this past holiday season? I mean…unless you count Look Who’s Talking Now as a great Christmas movie that reminds you of your childhood? No. Me either. I found myself really wanting to sit down and watch Home Alone! And after seeing all the comments from my Facebook friends about Elf on TBS, I wanted to watch that too! And can you believe that DH has never seen Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase?! ME EITHER!
But I couldn’t watch any of these because they’re conveniently not on Netflix. Oh and we couldn’t rent them, because Blockbuster and Hollywood Video cease to exist. And Redbox? Caters to more recent movie hits.
I’m now being forced to buy these movies on DVD and Blu-Ray. *whine*
Thanks to a just-in-time giftcard, I can now anticipate hunkering down with some popcorn and these classics next week.
Anyone want to come over and watch with me?!
ME ME I DO! PICK MEEEEE!I also highly recommend picking up the esteemed holiday classic “A Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.” It’s spectacular.
I have never seen that. Will pencil it in.
On our to-buy list first, and foremost, is Home Alone. Then How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Animated). Then It’s a Wonderful Life. THEN We’ll talk other random things ;p But we just got three classics out of the way in one fell swoooooop.
*raises hand* i actually have several Christmas movies on DVD but practically had to sedate my husband to convince him to watch them instead of football. but i guess 4 hours of me whining “but it’s christmas eeeevvvvveeeeeeeeee” finally got to him.
although a few were conspicuously missing from their cases. :/
Football is only on in our house when it’s live and the Bears are playing. We don’t do college football, and don’t care much about the other teams (We do like to know when the Packers lose tho…). And we were both gung-ho about watching Christmas movies until we realized we couldn’t. *sigh* We’re contemplating spending another gift card we got for Christmas on Home Alone and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Then our holiday movies will be fairly well rounded out