Hi there. Welcome to “Screen Time,” a weekly column about the positive side of family streaming written by father, author and blogger Clint Edwards. 

The first movie my wife and I watched together after she was released from the hospital last year was The Christmas Chronicles 2. It was Christmas Eve 2020. Mel and I had put the kids to bed, and after we did the Santa thing, we snuggled onto the sofa, a tree full of gifts to our right, and talked about how I absolutely adore Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. 

When it was announced way back in 2018 that Kurt — I call him Kurt around the house, because although we’ve never met, and we aren't really friends, he’s totally my friend, you know? — was going to play Santa, my wife actually said, “Did you hear your BFF is playing Santa?” And I’m not going to say I freaked out a little, but I did clap and squeal slightly in that uncontrolled way elementary kids sometimes do when they find out the school cafeteria is serving pizza for lunch. 

It began with Big Trouble In Little China. I wore out the VHS tape watching that movie over and over as pre-teen. The Thing scared the crap out of me in all the right ways, and Overboard made me fall in love with Goldie Hawn. 

So when it was confirmed that Goldie Hawn would be playing Mrs. Claus in the 2020 sequel... Oh wow! Well... I am actually writing this column from the afterlife, because I died of excitement. 

But by Christmas Eve 2020, I’d already watched Christmas Chronicles 2 twice, once with the kids and once alone, the whole time longing to watch it with my wife, Mel, but I couldn’t because she’d been in the hospital battling sepsis. She spent almost four weeks there, three days in the ICU. We almost lost her. Once we actually sat down to watch it together, she’d been home less than a month, and most of that time she didn’t feel up to watching a movie. That night was the first time she’d felt good enough to sit and snuggle and watch a movie, and we’d barely made it out of the opening credits before we started Googling. 

We sat on the couch, both of us still weary from the experience that we’d been through, Mel still thin and tired from her time in the hospital, both of us with our phones in hand looking up stories of Kurt and Goldie. I’m not sure exactly how we started down the internet rabbit hole. I don’t know if anyone ever really does, but I honestly can’t count how many times we’ve sat, and watched, and googled, and chatted, and loved every moment. 

We talked about Kurt and Goldie’s relationship, their Brady Bunch–style blended family, and their time together, and it seemed so clear that they were our new relationship goals. 

Why? 

Because Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn are basically a well seasoned pot who bring the spice of dozens of previous movies along with them, sure, but also a rich, heartwarming, real, and wholesome three-decade-long relationship that I could see the moment Goldie as Mrs. Claus said to their North Pole visitors, “Nick. What should we show them next?” 

And both said with loving glee “Candy Canes!” 

We watched, and Mel and I talked about how they met on The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band in 1968, only Kurt was 16, and Goldie was 21, and she said “I thought he was adorable, but he was much too young.” Then they met again years later, but both had committed to never dating another actor. It wasn’t until 1983, when she was a mother of two, and he was a father of one, and she couldn’t help but see how amazing Kurt was with her two children. That's when she started to fall for him. 

And as we read about this tangled star-crossed love affair that was two decades in the making, it seemed like God, or the fates, or some higher power kept pushing them together, and I think it made us both feel that true love was a thing, and two people could be drawn together by it, and maybe they were the same fates keeping our fires burning. 

Then we talked about the 1987 movie Overboard, and how I thought for years it was where Goldie and Kurt met and fell in love, but it turns out I was wrong. They were already a couple then. But come to think about it, though, this was where I first met Goldie and Kurt. I watched that movie when I was 9, and I’m pretty sure this is where I fell in love with them, and I realized that I wanted something like what they had. 

And naturally I told Mel about this, and somehow it evolved into a wacky conversation about us someday opening a miniature golf course (like what happened in Overboard), with the goal of making enough money to move to the North Pole and become Mr. and Mrs. Claus. 

A dream that became all the more real when we began to discuss the similarities between the first Christmas Chronicles and 1981’s Escape from New York. It’s an all-time Kurt dystopian classic, where Manhattan has been turned into a prison, and Kurt’s character, Snake Plissken, has to escape. It’s essentially the same plot line as the first Christmas Chronicles, only it was the lovable Santa escaping from Chicago, instead of a one-eyed professional killer. 

“Maybe Snake cleaned up his act and became Santa,” I said. “And if that’s the case, we could totally become Mr. and Mrs Claus one day.” 

I winked, and then we snort-laughed, and high fived, and snuggled, and watched and Googled some more. 

Reading about Kurt and Goldie was a huge relationship builder for sure, but the main reason this moment was so important had little to do with them. It’s because for the first time in almost a month, Mel and I forgot about what we’d just been through. We stopped fretting over Mel’s now sharp jawline and pitted eyes, or the clumps of hair she’s lost since hospital, or the pandemic, or the medical bills that were surely coming, or the long recovery that Mel would be facing in the coming months. 

For the first time, none of that came up, and we felt normal again. It was just Mel and me and Kurt and Goldie, half our attention on the excitement of the North Pole and saving Christmas, the other half looking up heartwarming moments of true love, both of us feeling inspired to be a stronger, more loving couple and feeling the gratitude two people feel being together after a near miss. 

And I think this, right here, these moments of connection between watching movies, the internet, and a loving couple, is not discussed nearly as much as it should be, because this moment was the happiest moment we’d had together since before Mel’s scare, and after everything we’d been through, it was easily as refreshing as a long holiday in Santa’s Village at the North Pole. 

Near the end of the movie, I stumbled onto this quote from Kurt, when he and Goldie received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: "To you, I owe my wonderful life. Simply put, Goldie, I cherish you and all the stars in the sky or on the boulevard can't hold a candle to that.” 

Then I paused, and I reread it to my wife, only swapped Goldie with Mel, and sure, it was cheesy, but who cares. 

She was glowing the way she did before she went into the hospital, and that glow, that spark of life, well... It felt a lot like hope that things were getting better, and that was more important, more rewarding, than any gift I had under our Christmas tree.