I Love Lucy

Dear old Grandma deserves the best this season, so check out today's holiday gift guide specially created with grandmothers in mind.

Here's a gift that could be a treat for both of you: I Love Lucy: The Complete Series. Make some tea and cuddle up with Grandma to watch Lucy and her hilarious adventures.

Or perhaps your grandmother is more of the mystery-solving type? Check out the seventh season of Murder, She Wrote, just released last month.

Listening to Nat King Cole's album The Christmas Song takes me right back to holidays spent at my grandparents' house. Cole's soothing voice provides the perfect soundtrack for a cozy holiday season.

The 1954 musical movie White Christmas features the fantastic foursome of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen, some great costumes and even greater songs, all by Irving Berlin. It's a sweet holiday film to watch with Grandma.

"Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead." So said this week's Bella Donna, the hilarious and lovely Lucille Ball. The star and co-producer of the long-running show I Love Lucy, she was also the first woman to head her own television production company, Desilu. She would have turned 96 this past Monday.

Oddly enough, while most people associate Lucille Ball with blazing red hair, she wasn't a natural redhead. A natural brunette, she colored her hair blonde as a starlet in the 1930s and 1940s. To look better in front of the television camera, she dyed it red and often wore a wig on the set. She stayed with that hue from the 1950s onward. (She once joked that she was keeping the economy of Egypt afloat with her annual orders of henna.)

Lucille Ball's look relied on very fair skin, bright red hair and exaggerated, drawn-on eyebrows. It made for an excellent on-screen contrast, but it's a little too dramatic for today. For suggestions on creating a modern interpretation of Lucille's style, and to see a gallery of her look throughout the years (including a rare shot of her as a blonde), read more

Every Wednesday on BuzzSugar, I post a Recast challenge, where I ask you to choose new actors for a classic TV show or movie. The reader who submits the best cast wins a BuzzSugar t-shirt!

I was delighted by way too many of the recast ideas for "I Love Lucy" to name them all here, but I do want to make some shout-outs before running out of room! I was highly impressed with some of the non-Debra Messing ideas for Lucy, such as K2's Kelly Ripa, Livience's Amy Adams and most of all the popular choice of Isla Fisher. I also liked many of the Ethel casting choices, like Marcia Gay Harden selected by prbeachbum, and ddene5713's pick of Kate Winslet. Finally, I think Pinkflats is onto something with casting John Leguizamo as Ricky.
My favorite list overall, however, comes from pepperatstate! In the end, I do think Debra Messing would make a perfect Lucy, and pepperatstate's other choices are great too. So to see who she picked along with a new cast photo, read more

• This week, I challenged you to come up with 50 songs for 50 states, and you did ... in about 20 hours. Whoa. But I'm still taking suggestions for the playlist.
• Speaking of playlists, I gave you a great set of vacation songs. And if you need other weekend listening, check out the new Ryan Adams album or videos from Kanye West and Amy Winehouse.
• With this weekend's opening of Michael Moore's controversial Sicko, I asked you if you typically see documentaries in the theater or wait to rent them.
• This week we learned that Harry Potter is looking for a few good kids, while Cameron Diaz will try her hand at horror and Ryan Gosling will play the dad in The Lovely Bones. No Susie yet, though.
• Were you as surprised as I was about who got kicked off "So You Think You Can Dance" and which guy Molly chose at the end of "The Starter Wife"?
• If you could recast "I Love Lucy" with modern-day actors, who would you pick? And speaking of great comedy, check out my favorite five (living) comedy couples.
• What do you make of Brett Ratner's Hugh Hefner biopic and Laurence Fishburne's adaptation of The Alchemist?
• And finally, this week marked Pearl's final acting performance. Let us all take a moment of silence.

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Every Wednesday on BuzzSugar, I post a Recast challenge, where I ask you to choose new actors for a classic TV show or movie. The reader who submits the best cast wins a BuzzSugar t-shirt!

This week's recast challenge is an oldie but goodie that was a recent recast request. Sure, certain aspects of the 1950s TV hit "I Love Lucy" make me cringe now (Ricky's jokey little threats of physical abuse come to mind), but overall this classic is still entertaining and endearing. If you could recast this show today, which actors would you cast as Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that many of you will put Debra Messing in Lucy's role, which is certainly fitting (how many times has she gotten that comparison?), though I'm curious to see if anyone has other ideas as well.

Leave your entry in the comment section below, and I'll pick one winner to feature Tuesday, July 3, complete with a "new" cast photo. To see a list of characters to recast and a photo of the BuzzSugar t-shirt, read more