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On these final few hours before the sugarplum-gorging orgy that begins at dawn, we dutifully tabulate for you, like a trembling Bob Cratchit scratching figures with a quill pen into the margins of the Scrooge & Marley ledger, the weekend's box office numbers:
1. National Treasure: Book of Secrets - $45.5 million
Frankly, we don't know what took infallible superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer and supermuse Nicolas Cage this long to bring us another Treasure chapter: With Secrets conquering this weekend's box office (and bringing in $10 mil more than the original), the American-history-corrupting adventure serial has now graduated to official franchise&trade status. We're eagerly anticipating all future installments, including National Treasure: Three Dollar Bill, in which Cage and his ragtag band of bookish fortune-hunters discover that the Lincoln Memorial's head spins to the left when a Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony dollar are placed in its orbital sockets, revealing a secret tunnel to J. Edgar Hoover's fabled lingerie closet.

2. I Am Legend - $34.2 million
A 56% drop-off in receipts for the last-Will-on-Earth sci-fi thriller still brings Legend's take to an impressive $137.5 mil, though it might also indicate that the premise needed a little refining. Luckily, producers have already begun making the proper adjustments for the sequel, replacing that German Shepherd (talented, but kind of one-note) with a grizzled straight-man for Smith to bounce his trademark one-liners off of, and those cheesy CGI zombies with a vast array of adorable aliens from Rick Baker's creature shop.

3. Alvin and the Chipmunks - $29 million
"It's great to be in the singing chipmunk business," Chris Aronson, Fox's senior VP of distribution, told Variety; that's a 180° change of tune from what execs were saying about the Jason Lee family film when the forecast looked less sunny, dismissively referring to it as "the untitled Richard Gere project" and "Ratatouille for retards."

4. Charlie Wilson's War - $9.6 million

5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - $9.3 million

It was neck-and-tomato-soup-hemorrhaging neck for both entries in the "sophisticated commercial choice for grownups" category, as Universal marketing head Adam Fogelson classifies his Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts Oscar-craving contender. Still, when you factor in that Sweeney played to half the screens of its competitor, a clearer winner emerges, proving a Cold War-era Tom Hanks trading Sorkinesque quips from behind a glass of Scotch to be less of a draw than watching Helena Bonham Carter get burned alive.

8. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - $4.1 million

We had a sinking feeling when our Arclight theater was three-quarters empty last night, and sure enough, the numbers justify it: With Walk Hard, Judd Apatow gets his first taste of box office disappointment—something that surely could have been avoided had the marketing better highlighted the film's frequent close-ups on a flaccid penis.