First hour: Special programming - "The Cook-Off"
Second hour: Special programming - "Selected Shorts: Holiday Hurdles with David Sedaris"
At the start of the pandemic, the entire Hamadi family found themselves living together under the same roof for the first time... in a long time. The three adult siblings - Adonis, Rima and Rami - hunkered down with their parents, keeping themselves entertained watching movies and pulling pranks. One day, after watching a cooking competition on TV, they decided to try their own cook-off. But what was intended as just another way to pass the time ended up helping the Hamadis, and hundreds of others, make a difference in ways they never could have imagined.
Then in our second hour, in Selected Shorts: Holiday Hurdles with David Sedaris, audiences are invited to reimagine holiday rituals. Selected Shorts’ late host and founder Isaiah Sheffer is featured as the reader of Tobias Wolff’s “Powder,” in which a pre-Christmas snowstorm provides an adventure for a father and son. In Allegra Goodman’s gentle borrowing from an O’Henry classic, a long-established couple discover they can surprise one another; Dana Ivey and Michael Cerveris read her “Gifts of the Jewish Magi. And David Sedaris says English writer Jeanette Winterson captures the city to a T in “Christmas in New York,” a modern fairy tale with just a hint of magic, performed by Richard Masur.
