Maggie returns to school after getting out of the hospital and immediately regrets it, as half of the students there know she was pregnant and the other half think that she was in the hospital because Carrie beat her up and stole Sebastian away. However, the group is trying to be less concerned about gossip, so for now, Maggie just has to work on her poker face and wait for the next scandal to hit the hallway. Mouse comes bounding up to her friends with news of her early admission into Harvard and it takes a second for them to get excited thanks to the other things that were on their minds. But soon enough, everyone crowds around Mouse, just as Walt goes into his living room and finds two suitcases that were packed by his mother. She told his father about what she saw in the paper and Walt has been kicked out of the house, as his father doesn’t want to see him right now because he had “put them through enough.”
Walt then shows up to Carrie’s door looking for a place to stay. She goes to talk to Tom about the possibility of Walt staying with them and while he’s sympathetic to the cause, he hesitates in saying yes, arguing that Walt staying there would make him uncomfortable and how he didn’t think they should be involved in other people’s family business. Carrie lays a massive guilt trip on him and Tom ultimately relents, allowing Walt to stay with them for the time being rather than watch as the boy slept in his car. Walt moves into Dorrit’s room and away from Bennett, who’s worried about his boyfriend after not hearing from or seeing him since he was kicked out. Carrie tells him that Walt is just looking to keep a normal routine by going to school and staying with her and talk turns to Samantha’s new gig as a sexy elf for a Bongo Jeans party and Carrie’s desire to not be the coffee intern anymore, as she has been dying to pitch articles again. She’s in luck, actually, because after a quick office meeting where Larissa mentions that the new trend they’ll be attacking is Americana denim, Carrie doesn’t get asked to bring her coffee.
That night, she sits in her room with Sebastian and talks to him about her article proposals, one of which is something on Bongo Jeans due to Samantha’s connection and the convergence of commerce and fashion. However, Sebastian does her one better by informing her that he has a connection of his own – this one to Carter Richmond, CEO of Bongo and golf buddy of his dad’s. As such, he can come to the party with her and possibly introduce her to Carter, although he warns her that his father might be there, too. The following day, Carrie and Maggie go out shopping as a part of their holiday tradition and run into Simon coming out of a department store with his fiancée. The awkwardness only lasts for a minute before Simon gets his fiancée to leave and Maggie has to sit down to process the encounter, as she hates that he’ll be having babies once he’s married to the other girl and she knows that her brother told him about the hospital stay, which he never checked on her during. Carrie tries to convince Maggie that she should tell her father what really happened, while Mouse waits for West to come back from the basketball regional tournament, which he and the team won for a third year in a row. She tells him that she got into Harvard expecting him to have gotten in, too, but he informs her that he didn’t get in. He’s not upset, though; in fact, he’s thrilled for Mouse’s accomplishment, knowing that it was a life long dream of hers to make it into Harvard.
Carrie pitches her article to Larissa over the phone and embellishes how much she knows Carter before leaving to go to the party with Sebastian, who came to pick her up in his Porsche. The only problem? His (unpredictable) dad will be there. The party turns out to be all red Santa hats, fake snow, and pretty girls with drink tables, and Sebastian spends their first few minutes there warning Carrie about his dad, only for him to pop up shortly after and get introduced to Carrie. Meanwhile, Walt decided to stay in and watch some episodes of The Golden Girls that he taped, confusing Tom since he’s used to having teenagers who can’t wait to leave the house, especially on Saturday night. Walt explains the premise of the show and what he likes about it, inviting a reluctant Tom to watch with him if he wanted to. Tom agrees, except he sits on the opposite end of the sectional from Walt and makes a face, thinking that he’s in for a long night of bad TV.
At the diner, Mouse patronizes West by talking about him not getting into Harvard like he was terminally ill and encouraging him not to give up on getting into one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. Irritated, he confesses that he didn’t apply early because he knew that only one resident of Castlebury would get in and he knew that if he applied, he would get in over Mouse – they have the same resumee/transcript, except he 
lettered in three sports and has a single mother and a disabled brother. As he leaves, Maggie goes to her father and confesses to having an affair with Simon. Luckily for her, though, her father isn’t mad at her; he’s mad at Simon for taking advantage of a teenage girl and he’s mad at himself for not protecting her in the way that he should. He gets emotional realizing this and goes over to hug his daughter. Back at the party, Carrie is doing a good job schmoozing with Sebastian’s dad, enough to where he volunteers to introduce Carter to her. However, Samantha comes over and lets it slip that she just had sex with him in the decorative Santa house and when Carter realizes that the girl who wanted to interview him was a high schooler, he dismisses Carrie as just a kid who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Of course, Carrie panics about the rejection and wants to leave, but Sebastian talks her into giving it another shot, as he knows she’ll regret it if she leaves without talking to him again. Meanwhile, Tom has relaxed and gotten into the show, sitting closer to Walt and giggling about their favorites and which one they most closely resemble. Tom thinks he’s a Dorothy, which Walt understands because of her everyman quality, and the two end up watching every episode that Walt brought over. As it’s 9:30, Tom expects him to go out on the town now; instead, Walt wants to go to bed. After seeing the way his parents looked at him when they found out he was gay, his opinion of himself has really taken a hit and he thinks that if he stops being gay/being with guys, they won’t hate him anymore. Tom assures him that he’s doing nothing wrong by being who he is and that it’s their issue whose burden he’s shouldering, not his own. Although Tom understands what it’s like for a parent to want their child’s life to be as easy as possible, which Walt’s won’t be since he’s gay, he doesn’t think that it’s right for a parent to make their child’s life any harder than it has to be.
Carrie ends up working her way into a conversation with Carter and Sebastian bonds with his father during the time alone, the latter expressing pride in how his son has gotten himself together without help from anyone. He suggests that they spend Christmas in Laguna together, which Sebastian is delighted to, while Simon gets fired by Maggie’s dad over the revelation of their affair. However, Simon doesn’t lay low for the time being; instead, he storms into the school hallway and berates Maggie for coming clean, telling her that she’s a little slut who asked for it. Carrie tries to interject, only for Simon to get physically threatening with her, and Sebastian quickly steps in, getting into a fight with the former cop and roughing him up out of revenge for Maggie and what he put him through by not coming clean in the first place. But considering Sebastian’s record, this was the last strike against him and he gets expelled from school. His father, though, is as proud as proud can be of his son standing up for what’s right and for sticking it to the Connecticut types that he could never bring himself to like. As such, he mentions how the only thing that was tying him to the state was Sebastian being in school and now that he’s not, the two can move to Laguna for good.
West finds Mouse at the diner and apologizes for what he said earlier. But he gets in more digs about how patronizing she was toward him and how he didn’t care as much about getting into Harvard so he “gave it” to her. He’s tired of the obsessiveness and the overly competitive nature of their relationship; she’s upset because he tainted her admission into Harvard, as she’ll always wonder if she got in for the right reasons, and because he obviously doesn’t have much faith in her if he did that and then told her about it. Over at Sebastian’s, he and Carrie spend their final moments together before he has to get up and get ready for his plane. He’s not wanting to leave her, but she thinks the idea of a long-distance relationship can be romantic, with its letters, plane rides, and phone calls. The two agree to not say goodbye but “see ya” and he heads off to a life in California.
While decorating the Bradshaw Christmas tree, Walt tells Dorrit, Tom, and Carrie that he feels like a part of their family and thanks them for everything since he’s been living there. Dorrit mentions being obsessed with cheesecake from Walt’s constant watching of The Golden Girls and Tom suggests that Walt go to Manhattan to get some, since he has Bennet there and the two could meet up. Walt heads off to spend time with his second family of Larissa, Samantha, and Bennet; Mouse gets a call from the head of the bio-chemistry department at Harvard, who personally shepherded her application through; Maggie and her father find a Christmas tree and strap it to the roof of their car; Sebastian admires the view at his new place in Laguna; and Carrie hears from Larissa, who tells her that the article on Carter is being published in Interview.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“And there may be bimbos.”
-“Oh, God, now I’m an everywoman.”
-“You and the hair god make quite the team.”
-Cute Audience Winks: Carrie creating her own way of saying goodbye to Sebastian and Tom’s (delightful) thing about how a show about four women talking about their problems would never last.
-That was easily the best end-of-episode montage they’ve done and a way of having a happy ending on a Christmas episode without things getting too treacly. A lot of shows of this ilk would pile on the schmaltz for the same type of scene, but The Carrie Diaries is earnest and intelligent enough to make the wins and emotion at the end of the episode feel like they were earned. Also, I might have cried when Carrie got her article published, even though I knew it was coming. The writer in me, y’all, was super proud of her.
-I love how they portrayed Tom this episode. He’s apprehensive being alone around Walt, an attitude that was especially prevalent during that time, but they didn’t make him a raging homophobe, instead focusing on the lack of (known) exposure he had with the LGBT population. That made the quick warm-up and (impossibly cute) bonding that he did with Walt feel realistic; it was already going to have quite the impact since Tom reassured the boy about being okay with who he is and told him the things that his own father wouldn’t, but it felt natural and wasn’t anything tacked on or overly modern in its sentiment. Tom’s a good man and I believe he sees how good of a person Walt is, so no matter his feelings about homosexuality, he’s a parent before all else, which is right in line with how they’ve written him.
-That being said, Walt and Tom are definitely both Dorothys. Personally, I’m a Dorothy who aspires to be a Blanche.
-Thing That Also Might Have Made Me Cry: Maggie telling her dad about Simon and him being on her side. She had built up in her head what he would say and you could feel the relief washing over her when she realized that perhaps for the first time in her life, her father was on her side. Her side. Maggie has been feeling especially alone this season, especially during her pregnancy, and she needs that type of stability that her dad can provide to not only put the pregnancy itself behind her, but to gain the confidence and self-assurance necessary to figure out what she wants to do with her life away from high school. She’s had a rough go of it lately and she needed a personal victory like this to keep going and allow herself to walk around with her head high at school.
-I was a little shocked that Simon came all the way to the school to make such a scene about Maggie. I figured that he would come up with some reason for being fired and maybe leave town with his fiancée before anyone else found out about what happened with Maggie, so for him to make it very clear that they had a thing, especially in a town as small as Castlebury and in front of a population of high school kids, was a bit of a surprise. I guess he was just overcome with anger from the firing that it was the first thing he did after he left the station, though.
-Tom’s face when Walt described the premise of the show was an amazing mix of horror and confusion. Also amazing, Larissa in a what looked like a denim onesie.
-West and Mouse’s relationship is a good argument for not being with someone exactly like yourself. I think they had a lot of nice moments together, but she was obnoxiously condescending toward him about him not getting into Harvard and he was a giant penis for basically the rest of the episode. I get being frustrated with her, but he knows how much Harvard means to her and to call her dream into doubt to boost his own ego was the textbook definition of a dick move. While Mouse may be a lot to handle and have even more to learn about interacting with/reading people, she didn’t deserve that. Ladies and gentlemen who are reading this recap, don’t be with someone who puts you down. Even if you think you’re supposed to be with them or that they fill out the picture you have in your head of what an ideal life would look like, it’s so not worth the trouble if they make you feel bad or don’t take what you love seriously. Love yourselves and each other.
–The Carrie Diaries is off next week, but in two weeks, Larissa gives Carrie tough love about her relationship with Sebastian, Dorrit throws a party that gets a little wild, and Mouse bonds with Donna.
