"People go mad for Christmas every year."
Hello everyone!
The month of shopping sprees, crazy drivers, and Hallmark's Christmas movies.
Well alright, that last bit's actually been going on since around the middle of November, or at least somewhere there-ish.
But you get what I mean.
And like I did last year, when I decided all my December blog post would be Christmas-themed, I'm repeating the motif this year, despite the fact that it's unnaturaly warm in my home town, the sun is out and the grass is greener than in spring time!
To kick us off for our month-long Christmas-theme extravaganza, I decided I'd pick one of the movies I'd already watched.
It was an eenie-meenie-miney-mo kind of thing.
Let's start it off with Christmas in Love!
This movie should have been a no-brainer.
It's about Christmas, it has Brooke D'Orsay in it who is quite adorable, it has a sort-of-redemption arc for a rich city boy, and it has Daniel Lissing playing said city boy. When Calls the Heart fans may still mourn his demise on the show (me among them!) but it looks like Hallmark isn't quite done with one of its leading men yet, which I'm thankful for!
Not so much for this movie, however, and I'll explain why by the end of this post.
Christmas in Love (this would be the 2018 movie, not the 2000-something one!) is the story of one Ellie Hartman who works at the town bakery, which is basically a factory making Christmas Kringles, a sweet apparently cherished and widely reknown.
Nick Carlingson is the son of the Kringles company CEO, and will take over the entire shin-dig once his dad retires, which is supposedly in the coming new year, though the father has some reservations.
See Nick is a big city guy, and he has big city ideas, which don't always mesh with small-town mentality.
So daddy-o sends his son over to the very bottom of the food chain, aka the bakery where it all started, so that he can see what the company is REALLY about (hint: it ain't machines or numbers).
Nick is, obviously. less than enthusiastic, especially after he and Ellie literally butt heads and he needs to buy shoes more appropriate for the snowy small-town weather as opposed to San Francisco's sunny days (this reminds me of a scene from Northern Lights where Eddie Cibrian was also ridiculed for his shoe choices to begin with). Still, he makes his way to the lodge, makes himself as comfortable as he can, and swears to bring the modern into the ways of the past.
Nothing is simple when he and Ellie figure out he's the guy she has to oversee and show around her dad's bakery, because lo and behold, there's tensionnnnn.
Also, Nick likes the feisty blonde, he just won't say it yet.
I won't detail every single shenanigan they get into, considering it's a fairly cut-and-mold story about rich city boy who has to impress small-town girl with his mishaps while trying to make Kringles (these do include icing among other things), but slowly and surely, Nick begins to improve, and through Ellie's not-so-subtle prompting and volunteering him for random things to do pre-Christmas in the town, he starts to feel both the holiday spirit AND the town spirit.
The more important storyline, in my mind, is this: as Nick becomes more welcoming to what's actually going on around him and the people who make Kringles as opposed to trying to swap them for machines, he learns Ellie is an inspiring crafter, and the bakery is and was a fall-back job for her.
And with crafter I mean Ellie makes some MEAN home-made Christmas wreaths and stockings and other ornaments.
Nick immediately sees a market niche for her, because, as he says it, people literally go crazy every year for Christmas, so whatever she made, because it was so unique, it'd sell immediately.
Ellie, however, is hesitant, because she's BEEN to San Francisco, at the corporate headquarders incidentally, but she failed to get the job there, which makes Nick feel kind of bad since he's pretty sure that she's wasted in the small town area.
Not because he doesn't love the town, you see, but because he loves Ellie and wants her to flourish.
Yes, they kiss, they make goggly eyes at one another, and her parents approve of him.
They also stay up all night to make wreaths and other ornaments for Ellie's stall during this Christmas fair she agrees to do last-minute, and coincidentally it's organised by her ex, though the unravelling of this side-plot has to be hilarious:
the ex kind of wants to date her best friend. Best friend likes him back, too. Both of them are terrified about what Ellie will say.
Ellie: ohmygosh that's it? HALLELUYAH BLESSINGS ON YOU BOTH
You know what I mean.
But of course there has to be a downslide: just as Nick's dad makes a surprise appearance in town (Nick did not, in fact, share who he was at the beginning), Ellie delivers a San Francisco themed wreath to Nick's lodge room, only to stumble inside (does nobody lock their doors?) and see an open laptop computer with the plans Nick's been trying to edit all movie as he learned more and more about the town (and Kringles).
In true woman scorned fashion, Ellie refuses to speak or see Nick again, prompting him to make a very public apology in the town square as he announces he'll be taking over the company, but also says nobody will be losing their job - in fact, he's figure out a way to bring MORE jobs to the people!
Success! Ellie loves him again and they kiss and make up.
Uhm.
Can you tell which part of the movie I have issues with?
The storyline itself has been done before, but I don't mind. It's Christmas. I'll live! The thing I had an issue with was that absurd ending, made purely for the sake of drama. Not for plot purposes, you see, or character advancement, but drama.
One, if the room you're visiting is accidentally unlocked, even if you fall into it, the correct thing to do would be to put the bloody wreath down and back off as quickly as possible. Snooping is a capital offence in my book, and good manners dictate that you explain to the owner of the room what happened. Even if there IS an open laptop on the table, running, that doesn't give you the right to look, or browse through the document.
Two, if all of the above has actually occurred for some reason, I refer to good manners once again, in which you're supposed to tell the owner of the room what happened, what you read (somehow by accident), and apologise for snooping.
Three, if you do see something incriminating or bad, the first lesson should be IT'S YOUR OWN GODDAMN FAULT FOR SNOOPING. The second would be to march up to the guy and demand to know what the hell he's doing. In no way, shape or form, does it make sense for you to freeze him out and refuse to talk to him. Luckily for Ellie in this movie, Nick actually wanted to talk to her badly enough that he kept trying, despite her stonewalling him. Any reasonable (and real) man in this day and age would only try so many times before he shrugged and walked off, unwilling to bother anymore. Because, really girl, if you're not going to talk to him, he can't read minds, so why would he want to ruin his Christmas holidays trying to crack your thick skull open?
Four, it is humiliating to make a guy apologise to you in front of the whole town. If you have a problem, deal with it in private.
I could probably elaborate on this more, but I think I'll stop here. The ending soured the entire movie for me even though it had Lissing in it. This is one I will definitely NOT be rewatching.
But hey, we've started at the bottom so it can only go up from here, right?
xx
*images and video not mine
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