Yoh! Christmas.
I was feeling out of it last Friday because I’d gotten my Covid and flu shots the day before. I’d planned to try to stay in the groove of working even though the holidays were beginning to loom big, make me want to do nothing but lie on the couch, watch TV. My mom said if I was feeling sick from the shots, to consider the whole day a wash, so I decided to instead do what my body was slowly gravitating toward anyway: pile on the blankets, lie on the couch, watch Netflix until I floated into oblivion.
I was already pretty deep into the show First Wives Club, which is fun and silly and propulsive, but I figured that for this sick day, it might be good to watch something new. I wanted to watch something that I could tackle completely during this day on the couch, and swiftly presented to me—as Netflix likes to do, playing the trailer for things immediately, before you can even press the down button, move on—was this South African rom-com six episode show Yoh! Christmas.
It’s a classic predicament: beautiful high-achieving woman is getting older and is still single because she is particular about who she wants to hitch the rest of her life to (understandably). Her family is pressuring her to settle down—because what about children? what about marriage?—despite her myriad of other accomplishments. In a funny scene from this show, her mom tells her that she wants grandchildren and then the camera pans to all of the grandchildren that are surrounding her at the dinner table. “More grandchildren,” she says.
Her daughter Thando lies and says she has a boyfriend, as this character almost always does in these stories, and then is hustling to find someone before Christmas so that she can bring him home and make her family proud (again, all of her other very impressive accomplishments do not suffice because she is still single).
Thando proceeds to go on a number of terrible dates—perfectly cringe and hilarious—with men who seem fine but always have some weird thing about them that ends up making them kind of unbearable: they’re wildly famous, suddenly impatient, somehow a flash mob hip hop dancer. She keeps going, tries to find someone who she can bear (and who can bear her) long enough to bring home for the holidays. Of course, in the real world, two weeks is arguably not long enough to then introduce said person to your entire family, but alas, this is not the real world. (Though reality shows are also very much not the real world, Yoh! Christmas reminds me of one of my favorite reality shows—12 Dates of Christmas—which had the very wholesome premise of cycling through dates for three people who were trying to find someone that they too could bring home for the holidays.)
Even though we’ve seen this story a cajillion times, it was fun—on the couch—to watch Thando try to find love and make her family proud, her dating life always a little rushed and a little doomed. For example, there’s this embarrassing hilarious plotline where she goes home with this guy who’s only like 19 and ends up falling so hard for him that she bakes him a cake and brings it to his house party teeming with teenagers. I, head aching, body coursing with all the medicinal juices from my shots, couldn’t stop watching this show, even if I knew, in more ways than one, how it would go.
Before I met my boyfriend, I too was running these streets going on sometimes fine, sometimes good, but often terrible dates (especially in Iowa where it seemed like the only people you could date were your classmates—who you could not escape if things went south—or random White people summoned from the Internet, some normal, but some, like Thando’s suitors, a bit unhinged). There’s the sense, when you’re single for a long time, that maybe you’re cursed, will never get to the end of this line of awkward maybe-partners. It is gorgeous when you meet someone who you both love spending time with and who loves being with you—it makes all of the searching and the yearning and the screamingly embarrassing cake bringing moments worth it, though before you find someone like that (and after you do), as Thando announces to her family, the love you already have—your friends, your family, your pets, your pastimes—can always carry you too.
Image: Netflix
