Here’s some early ashes and coal

I had to force myself to go and see “Christmas With the Kranks,” and then I had to force myself to stay. If this is what the spirit of Christmas is about, then give me Halloween any day.

Look, there were more – and funnier – jokes associated with the Kennedy assassination than there are in this film. And at least Oliver Stone didn’t insult us with an ending sappier than a forest of maple trees.

I have nothing against sap. I love sap. I cry at Kodak commercials, if you need to know. But the melodrama here just can’t mask a plot meaner than Margaret Hamilton and twice as ugly.

The film’s sins: A number of obvious “Home Alone” references, making Jamie Lee Curtis masquerade as a matronly housewife, more exaggerated moments than Jim Carrey doing standup, filling the screen with (redundancy alert) a mugging Dan Aykroyd , and making Tim Allen’s character stingier than Donald Trump in divorce court. For all this and more, “Christmas With Kranks” should be taken out into a Vermont forest and shoved under a rotting stump.

Preferably one that’s maple .