Jennifer Garner and Claire Danes on the Same Show Monday Night

About the only way you'd get me to watch Martha Stewart's Holiday Open House is to book Claire Danes and Jennifer Garner onto the show to make tasty gingerbread men out of old Thanksgiving turkey bones and some dirt from the front yard.

And wouldn't you know, that's exactly what that savvy Martha Stewart has done, except for the gingerbread man part. Jennifer and Claire together on one show! Now there's a Christmas present. Martha and friends pop in at 8 p.m. tonight (Monday) on the Hallmark Channel (which in Comcast homes in the Philadelphia region is most likely to be found on Channels 65 or 137, or Channel 830 in high definition).

The newly married (Hugh Dancy) Danes talks about spending Christmas with his parents every year as they all journey to a different city for the holidays. Must be nice to be rich and fancy free. Claire and Martha make egg corns out of blown goose eggs adorned with velvet ribbon, according to press materials for the show, which fail to explain what egg corns are.

Garner, a Stewart-show regular, whose yellow Labrador retriever is named Martha Stewart, has a better job: drinking champagne and helping to mix up the batter and arrange it out of the pastry bag for Stewart's famous Golden Cream Cheese Bow Cookies. I'm sure they use Philadelphia cream cheese, though I'll be too busy gazing at the lovely Jennifer to check.

We'll be lucky to see her ever again in series TV, but you won't have to be lucky to see Danes.  All you have to do is fork over the Showtime subscription fee. Her new show, Homeland, is about a former prisoner of war who may or may not have been programmed as a terrorist, and the CIA agent (Danes) who's suspicious of him. Produced by some of the people from 24, it will go into production as soon as Showtime can find someone to play the guy.