Boogity, Boogity, Boogity, Let’s Go Christmas Singin’ Boys!

This post will probably be a little shorter tonight and make even less sense than usual as I decided it was a great idea to take the family out Christmas shopping tonight. After the several hour ordeal was over and we hiked back to our truck, I decided we would never do that again…

Boy does Christmastime bring weird bedfellows (that’s just a cliché in this case, trust me). I put the TV on this morning while packing Lucy and Ethel’s lunch boxes in the hopes of finding some nice Christmas music on one of DirecTV’s Christmas music channels. They are named holiday appropriate things like ‘Holly,’ ‘Country Christmas’ and ‘Non-Offensive Over-Commercialized Holiday Music Standards.’ In flipping through their handy on-screen viewing guide I saw a listing for something that I truly felt had to be a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. It was an hour and a half show of Christian Christmas Music performances hosted by Amy Grant and former NASCAR champ and current NASCAR broadcaster Darrell Waltrip. If you aren’t a NASCAR fan, this may be lost on you but having Amy Grant and DW together is a particularly odd pairing. Don’t get me wrong, I love Amy Grant and am a big fan of Waltrip but never thought I’d see them together unless they were presenting an award at a really twisted awards show. That’s usually where you see two people together that would never spend time with each other and unfortunately that’s how it comes across to the viewer most of the time.

Not to take anything away from either one of them, but I wonder what market or audience DirecTV was trying to capture by asking these two to host their program of holiday praise music. Of course I only watched a few minutes of it, but I feel it qualifies me to blog about it. Amy Grant’s selection appeals to both the mainstream and the more religious, but DW can’t have a ton of cross over appeal I would assume. One of sports’ biggest sectors is the NASCAR fan so maybe they were hoping all us diehard stock car people would tune in for an hour and a half just to see him. Obviously it kinda worked, like on me for example. Was Amy Grant’s husband Vince Gill busy? Did they ask Jeff Gordon and he said no because he just married and impregnated a model?

I guess they could have done worse in matching co-hosts. Some really bad pairs that come to mind would be Kelly Ripa and Clay Aiken, Star Jones and Barbara Walters, Simon Cowell and anybody or Bill Clinton and Kenneth Star. Actually George W. Bush and Al Gore would probably be awkward too, now that I think about it. Maybe it was because it was early this morning or because I am ruminating about it tonight when it is so late, but seeing Amy Grant and Darrell Waltrip in the same sentence struck me as odd and a little funny. I know what it was, I had just finished walking three miles in 37-degree weather (I sound like my grandfather) and my blogging trough was pretty dry tonight. As odd as the pairing seemed to me, it was worth the few minutes I watched to hear Darrell Waltrip say the phrase ‘wrapped in swaddling clothes.’ Amazingly, he wasn’t talking about Jeff Gordon. Of course he described some of the acts as ‘really hauling,’ ‘pushing like a dump truck’ and I am pretty sure he described one singer as ‘needing to take half a round of wedge out and go down a quarter pound on the right side.’ Ok, I made that last part up…but I still don’t like Jeff Gordon!

Hey, maybe Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton will host ‘An Old Fashioned Family Christmas’ together tomorrow…