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You Can’t Always Get What You Want: A Very Cumberbatch Christmas

All I Want For Christmas Is Benedict Cumberbatch. (Illustration by Katie Tandy)

Yes, well I want to marry Benedict Cumberbatch and move to Paris, but that’s not going to happen, now is it?

It would be nice to set my Out Of Office Auto-Reply to “Gone Fishin’ With Benedict Cumberbatch Except Not Really Just More Figuratively,” but I don’t really know how to do that.

You know, I’d like to wrap Benedict Cumberbatch up in a burrito and eat him, but my local Chipotle probably has E. coli.

I want Benedict Cumberbatch to put up holiday decorations while I mix us Manhattans and contemplate an erotic — yet festive — lighting scheme, but I have very limited lighting options in my house.

I’d like Benedict Cumberbatch to watch the whole 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice with me on my couch — twice — but I accept that he’s probably busy with Patrick Melrose right now.

I’d really enjoy helping Benedict Cumberbatch pick out another great black skinny tie, but I must accept that he can probably do that on his own.

I’d like to take Benedict Cumberbatch to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to determine which classical Roman nose most closely resembles his own, but doubt I have enough miles saved up.

It would be my greatest desire to help Benedict Cumberbatch write his letters to Santa on behalf of the world’s children who seek joy and hope, but I would actually be terrible at that.

I’d like a Benedict Cumberbatch-shaped garden gnome for Christmas, but I’m not aware that such a thing is manufactured.

I want to take a scenic mountain drive with Benedict Cumberbatch and occasionally stop to look at historic old mills and crumbling barns, but my car is really, seriously covered in dog hair.

I want Benedict Cumberbatch to put up holiday decorations while I mix us Manhattans and contemplate an erotic — yet festive — lighting scheme, but I have very limited lighting options in my house. Click To Tweet

I’d like to live on a houseboat and have Benedict Cumberbatch write me poetry in rigid and challenging forms like the villanelle and the sonnet, but I don’t seem to have a houseboat at present.

I would love to take Benedict Cumberbatch to the Monterey Bay Aquarium so he can work through the fact that he looks like a hot otter, but I don’t imagine I’m going to be in California in the near future.

I would enjoy chatting with Benedict Cumberbatch about the challenges that actors face when they approach a role, but he hasn’t engaged me on the subject.

It would be a joy to go to Target with Benedict Cumberbatch and pick up some holiday décor and perhaps a few groceries, but I just went to Target last weekend and should probably rein it in.

I want to hang out with Benedict Cumberbatch and his mum at the Chelsea Flower Show, but I acknowledge that they probably wouldn’t take me as I know very little about flowers.

It would be delightful to circumnavigate the globe with Benedict Cumberbatch and several cases of champagne and quail eggs, but I get seasick on open-ocean ferries.

I’d like to give Benedict Cumberbatch an ugly Christmas sweater and then climb all over him like a holiday Jungle Gym, but rumor is he’s not into ugly Christmas sweaters, so that’s just too bad for me.