Mainline holiday cheer with Lifetime’s mini Christmas movies

Sure, it’s cutting it close, but there’s still time to revel in the predictable-yet-comforting ritual of the Lifetime Christmas movie thanks to the channel’s six new short films.

Lasting roughly 11 minutes each, there’s barely any plot and virtually no conflict. They’re basically a brief introduction, a couple of scenes of sassy and/or nosy seniors and — Boom! — happy ending. Watching them is like mainlining holiday cheer.

Five are being rerun Sunday and Monday, but all six can be viewed for free at MyLifetime.com/movies.

Only available online is “The Christmas Snowman,” in which a young woman wishes for a man for Christmas. After helping the neighborhood children with their snowman, who’s named Willie and sports a top hat and a red scarf, she’s awoken from a nap by a knock on her door, where she’s greeted by a man calling himself William and wearing a top hat and a red scarf. It’s pretty much “Frosty the Snowman,” except rather than running here and there, all around the square, saying “Catch me if you can,” they start making out. “The Christmas Trap” (11:02 p.m. Sunday), in which a couple headed for divorce reconcile after being stuck in an elevator, is worse than a lump of coal. Coal has value.

In “Delivering Christmas” (11:17 p.m. Sunday), an elderly busybody convinces the mailman, named Mailman Tom, to start delivering his version of the 12 days of Christmas to an attractive single mother.

After a parade of actors I’ve never knowingly laid eyes on, you could’ve knocked me over with a sprig of holly when I saw Vivica A. Fox and the wonderful character actor Bill Cobbs in “My Christmas Grandpa” (11:47 p.m. Sunday). Cobbs portrays Mr. Furlong, the bah-humbugging owner of the Mini Mart that Fox’s daughters visit daily. When asked what she wants for Christmas, the youngest girl says “Mr. Furlong” — kind of like Richard Pryor in “The Toy” minus the racial overtones.

Then there are the “back in my day” twins.

In “The Ugly Christmas Sweater” (11:17 p.m. Monday), a marketing assistant at a social media branding company is desperate to prove her worth by landing a big account that requires making a Christmas hashtag trend. “I have all these hashtag ideas, but what if they’re terrible?” she asks her grandmother, with whom she lives. “Back in my day,” Granny responds, “they called it a pound sign, and nobody was so stressed about it.”

That grandma has nothing, though, on the one in “A Family for the Holidays” (11:32 p.m. Sunday). “I’m quite a fixture on the street. I’ve been living here for 50 years,” she tells the matriarch of the family that just moved across from her in a neighborhood that’s clearly only a few years old. Waiting for her to return from running errands with her children so she’ll come over for Christmas cookies — She promised! — Grandma watches out the window for her return, then sighs disapprovingly when she doesn’t visit. Any other month on Lifetime, Grandma would end up stealing at least one of those kids.

Then the “back in my day” gene rears its ugly head. “In my time we didn’t bother with the colored lights and the big tree,” she shames her neighbor. “Our decorations were our family and friends all around us.”

Spoiler alert: There’s a happy ending. Even though she seems destined for visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and You Don’t Have Much of a Future Left.

TV to watch

■ Jodie Foster directs one of the six installments in the fourth season of the acclaimed anthology series “Black Mirror” (Friday, Netflix).

■ Before Peter Capaldi hangs up his coat as the Twelfth Doctor and regenerates into Jodie Whittaker’s new Doctor, he’ll team up with his former self (David Bradley’s First Doctor) in the episode “Twice Upon a Time,” aka The “Doctor Who” Christmas Special (6 p.m. Sunday, BBC America).

■ Planet Hollywood headliner Lionel Richie joins Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, TV legend Norman Lear and dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade as winners of the 40th annual Kennedy Center Honors (9 p.m. Tuesday, CBS).

■ Go behind the scenes of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment in the documentary “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story” (8 p.m. Thursday, Fox).

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.