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.