Dan and Jenny are sipping some delicious Only Coffeeshop In NYC coffee while she browses GG.net and wonders why she's not headline news today. Dan approaches her for not the first of many times, wondering if she's ready to talk about it. One way I will never talk shit about Dan, even when he gets irritating about it, is the big brother thing with Jenny. We never got to see that on The O.C., because Seth and Ryan had a vested interest in being equals, and everybody else was basically single-child households -- and even when they combined, Kaitlin was Taylor and Summer's big sister anyway. "Dad said he didn't want to ruin Christmas, that's all I'm trying to do," says Jenny, and credit where it's due: that's cool of her. Dan assures her once again that she has him as a resource, to the point where we all kind of know that he's the one that wants to talk about it. But because it's Dan -- great wonderful sweet silly Dan -- he wants to "talk" in such a way where he can reassure Jenny and thus reassure himself through a speech, when really Jenny's WAY too self-involved to actually care, plus she knows she fucked up bringing her stupid mom home in the first place. They look at various websites for Serena presents -- it's the 24th, mind you, so this is an empty and pointless pursuit -- and none of them are even slightly appropriate, so there's a whole Humphrey of BS filler where Jenny's like, "Look, a year of cheese for $600," and Dan is like, "I would make my own cheese if I could," and Jenny's all, "You're gross because you said 'make my own cheese'!" and I swear, entirely different people are writing this show for the Humphrey parts, because it's always like this: laborious and nonsensical buildup to a laborious and irrelevant punchline.

I believe that Jenny can be awesome and that the Humphreys one day won't feel hammered into the awesomeness of this show. Santa Baby, I've been an unbelievably good boy this year. Please, bring me a Humphrey storyline that doesn't feel like the queerest filler in the Sovereign Republic of Queerdonia. You're halfway there: just marry Lily off to Bart Bass, ship Alison off to Hudson or Hell or something, and get Jenny to bitch out on somebody other than her parents, and you're golden. Dan and Serena already make each other interesting the way it is, and I love their romance, so just get it done. Assorted Humphriana leads into the self-evident fact that Serena's Xmas is going to suck no matter what, because she and her mom and boobyhatch brother are living in a hotel suite, to which facts Dan responds as if he didn't even think of that, and then it's decided: though the Palace does not allow Xmas trees (for real, that is a dumb rule) and you've got it. And we've seen it already so we know what's going to happen, and it's going to look totally awesome, and Dan is great and whatever, we're done here. Dan and Jenny will give the van der Woodsens a Christmas tree and thus spackle over their hideous existence. You know, I don't have a lot of native Xmas spirit. My Christmas is what I call Scary Christmas: the "Carol Of The Bells," everything lit with candles and white-only tree lights, lots of velvet and everything sounding like it's coming from underwater at the end of the year. But one thing I could count on with that other show I keep mentioning is the amount of Xmas cheer you get: every year, somebody saves Chrismukkah -- Ryan gets a stocking, Lindsay makes yarmulklauses, everybody wakes up from their comas -- and you cry a little bit, and it's so wonderful and you're part of a family. And I just realized it's unfair for me to expect Chrismukkah from this show, even though there is token effort in that direction with the whole Gift Of The Magi thing that Dan and Serena do for each other. But really, what I want is every single character on the entire show in one room wearing silly hats, because that's how my Christmasses usually go, and that's Chrismukkah to me. Give me a hug!