Martha Stewart Captured the Unhinged Side of the Holidays in a Bonkers Christmas Special

It’s amazing to think about now, but once upon a time, there was apparently a limited amount of television programs and, consequently, a lot of extra time, especially in December, that TV programmers needed to fill. There were, of course, the annual broadcasts of Frosty and Rudolph and Charlie Brown and the Grinch, plus John Denver and the Muppets (a particular favorite in my family) but those only filled a few hours of the entire long season.

What to do? Show a network Christmas special, of course! Why not assemble a whole bunch of people who had nothing in common besides having contractual obligations to the same television network and have them sing songs and perform half-assed skits and discuss the probability of snow and the arrival of Santa on camera in order to fill up an hour of TV time?

This is the best explanation I can think of for why, back in the days when there were still airwaves, they were clogged every December with hours and hours of network Christmas specials. I have no idea why we spent hours watching them. Maybe we had nothing better to do?

It’s funny to go back and look at them now. Last month, under the auspices of research for another story, I came across a series of Martha Stewart Christmas specials from the ’90s, now available on YouTube (with commercials intact!). At first, I tried to watch them seriously, in the spirit of scholarship. Around halfway through the 1995 edition, right when Miss Piggy “helps” Martha build a gingerbread house and comes on to Ben the Builder, the guy who built Martha’s actual house, while Martha delicately hammers in straight pins to keep the whole thing from falling apart, I began to appreciate the Christmas special for the truly batsh*t cultural artifact that it was.

Witness the resigned expression on Hillary Clinton’s face as she and Martha put up the White House wreath. (“I was going to change the world, and now here I am, putting up a goddamn wreath.”) See Martha struggle to avoid cracking up as Miss Piggy repeats the word “Necco” to the point that it becomes absurd. Watch Martha and Julia Child make croquembouches together and see how Martha’s Christmas tree-shaped pile of cream puffs and caramel towers over Julia’s. Wonder if outshining Julia Child is, in fact, an unforgivable faux pas. In between segments, experience glorious commercials for Celestial Seasonings tea. What a time the ’90s were to be a white lady!

The 2000 edition, Martha Stewart’s Christmas Dream, is something more: it is an absolute masterpiece of insanity. This is because it has a plot.

This is the plot: Martha Stewart is hoping for a white Christmas, but the grass outside her Connecticut farmhouse is, alas, still green. Martha mentions several times, wistfully, that Christmases during her New Jersey childhood were covered in drifts of snow. But because she is Martha Stewart, she will make her own white Christmas, dammit, with pipe cleaner snowflakes, wreaths coated in fake snow, and little ice houses made of sugar cubes.

Unbeknownst to Martha, however, Santa is actually a weather god who controls snowfall on Christmas and he is very displeased with Martha because she has not left him cookies in years. This, and not climate change, is why Martha doesn’t get her darned white Christmas! Periodically, usually after Martha says something about how nice it would be to have snow, the action returns to the North Pole, where Santa cackles evilly and makes little threats like, “This is not a good thing.” (Santa also rejects a gift request from Bill Gates. Santa is a Mac user.)

Martha also learns to carve ice with a chainsaw, gets schooled in swan terminology by her teenage niece, and makes meringue nests with Lorraine Bracco, who appears to be slightly wasted and is therefore mesmerized by the pastry bag. Best of all, she interacts with herself as played by Ana Gasteyer from Saturday Night Live, and after that, you cannot watch the real Martha without fixating on her clipped consonants. Then Martha falls into a very fake sleep and dreams of wandering through a snowy forest. And Cyndi Lauper sings!

The whole thing is like a fever dream or how the world sometimes feels when you are drunk or high. Which is probably the best way to watch Martha Stewart’s Christmas Dream. (I have tried it both ways, and it was definitely better with an edible beforehand.)

There is something about the holiday season that makes everything feel a bit off-kilter anyway: the darkness at 4:30 in the afternoon, the colored lights, the endless compulsion to eat cookies and buy things, Santa Claus suddenly appearing everywhere in all sorts of improbable situations (at the mall, at your local bar, riding the subway, at a Hanukkah menorah-lighting).

Martha Stewart’s Christmas Dream fully inhabits this spirit. Even the parts that don’t concern vengeful-weather-god Santa are absurdist. Who would honestly want to sprinkle their living room with pulverized styrofoam?

Martha is still the queen of Christmas crafts, but I don’t think she has a wrathful Santa on her current Roku series, Martha Holidays, and that is a darned shame. Lorraine Bracco is absolutely right that there is something mesmerizing about watching someone else pipe meringue and icing. But there is drama in Martha Stewart’s Christmas Dream! Christmas is at stake!

(Okay, not really, because even when — spoiler alert — Santa is appeased by cookies, Martha has already created a winter wonderland in her own living room.)

The holidays can make us all a little crazy. What a joy it is to get inside one of the more insane corners of Martha Stewart’s brain and indulge her fantasy that, with enough glitter and pipe cleaners, we can all have the white Christmas of our dreams, without the bitter cold, family arguments, and travel delays.

Martha Stewart’s Christmas Dream is streaming on Martha Stewart TV.

Aimee Levitt is a writer and editor based in Chicago.