“It's Not Christmas Without Grandma” (“Stuck In A Moment” Recap)

And the family came too close to comfort to finding out what Christmas without Alex would be like.  A little too much hyperbole?  Yes, but...

File this one in the “it's a good thing that...” folder.  In other words, it's a good thing that the episode as a whole was hysterical and touching, because I'm less than thrilled with how Alex really got the short end of the stick in this one.

Basically, Alex's role in this episode was to get more and more health ailments (gray hair, some sort of stomach pain, eczema – can she use Jay's elbow grease for that, loose teeth, organs shutting down??) from the stress of holding in Haley's secret, until Haley finally broke the news and Alex could breath again.  Or, as I put it in this tweet I sent near the end of the show:

Thank goodness Haley finally broke the news - a few more minutes and poor Alex might not have lived to see Christmas #modernfamily

— Joe D. (@noahproblem) December 13, 2018

Or, at the very least, she might have let out the secret in a blood curdling scream so loud that Sanjay could have heard it...if Sanjay was late getting back home for the holidays from Stanford.

And to add insult to (literal) injury, Claire accused Alex of knowing about Phil's plan for taking the Christmas tree to his open house.

At least poor Alex didn't have to take the fall for the tree catching fire – I could picture Phil and Claire forcing her to take the blame (just like she wound up doing so to save the kids' Christmas nine years ago when the couch caught fire and the kids were wrongfully punished for it).

All in all, Alex had a worse Christmas Eve than the poor little girl from Frosty the Snowman.  OK, another slight exaggeration, but there's a reason I've only watched that show once.

I have a feeling I may need to write a more general post about worrying about Alex during the break – the last two weeks have been hard on her.

Alex's Line Of The Night: ”Promise me you won't homeschool this kid.”  I did have a feeling when I saw that preview that this would be her best line of the night.  Unfortunately it turns out it's because she didn't say much else.

So we now know we won't be back until January 9th.  We're in the middle of the busy season at work (including Christmas for me again this year, again by choice) so I probably won't have much time to post much anyway (especially with the yo-yo schedule I have during the holiday itself), except for any new episode information.  And the aforementioned column worrying about Alex.