Christmas Joy

Christmas Joy (2018) - Hallmark

By Lisa Sue 

Get it? The movie is called Christmas Joy and our heroine is named Joy! Take a shot! It has been a minute since I scored against the Christmas drinking game. But let’s take a gander- dead relative, check. Joy is some market researcher from the big city of Washington DC who comes home to North Carolina for the holidays to help her Aunt who is convalescing. This is the same Aunt who raised her because…drum roll…Joy’s mom is dead. I didn’t pay enough attention to understand exact nature of the Aunt’s ailment. I also can’t state if fake Christmas trees were dissed, however considering their Cookie Crawl theme is Mother Nature I presume the hate of fake trees is implied, if not explicitly said. Now this town (if you can recall the town name, please reply) is all about Christmas traditions. It has not only a gingerbread contest BUT it also has a cookie crawl! And for someone who spent the last couple of years of high school in this town, one would have thought Joy would be better informed. Not to mention her Aunt seems to be the co-chair of the Cookie Crawl so why the rules and regulations of the contest are new and surprising to Joy is…shocking. But these movies don’t invite a lot of questions so I will move on.

Regarding the hot chocolate, well this movie provides a twist. What will improve your hot chocolate? A shot of habanero (exactly which pepper escapes the memory), which is a nice connection to her dead mother because as a child that’s how her mom would make hot chocolate. Now as an adult, I get the chocolate with a bit of heat combination is good. I can’t imagine spicy is what children want though with hot chocolate, they’re more of the “more marshmallow” contingent. Regarding baking cookies, there is literally nothing but baking cookies in this movie as the big event is the Cookie Crawl. What is a cookie crawl you ask? I can say it is self-evident, I feel the answer is going from home to home and eating Christmas cookies. But then why so many cookies at one house? And one can question why you need a theme for a cookie crawl- the theme is Christmas people! Always Christmas! They’re cookies, I feel a theme takes away from their sugary goodness. I would totally dig a tropical snow theme or whatever nontraditional themes that Joy was pushing. I clearly need to take better notes when these are playing in the background, obviously there are a few gaps in the plot on my end.

But while I may not recall the town name, who won the gingerbread contest, or if Jingle Bells played, I do know the most important thing of all- how it ends. Earlier on in the movie a precious green ornament that belonged to Joy’s mom falls and breaks. The grand gesture isn’t to replace it, but Ben takes the broken pieces and creates a new ornament out of them. Neither ornament is winning any awards and isn’t finial d'arbre quality (thank you Christmas At The Plaza) but it is the thought that counts. The ornament Ben creates is made with such care and love that Joy realizes how Ben really feels, even if he didn’t say anything. The breakup in this one is soft and comes as a shock to Joy who doesn’t understand why Ben drove all the way to her big Christmas party in DC only to then abruptly leave without seeing her. As the comedy of errors ensues, Ben avoids her calls which is a shame because while the gingerbread contest is done the Cookie Crawl is just starting. Aunt is overjoyed with the Mother Nature theme, and it seems that Ben (Mr. Christmas) washes his hand of the Cookie Crawl, but naturally that letdown is overlooked.  Joy decides to not to stay in DC, since her heart wasn’t 100% in the job anymore. Instead come the new year she gets to work for one of her old clients who’s dumped Joy’s original marketing firm and doing the analysis inhouse in North Carolina, near this small snowy town. What are the odds? Career back on track, the misunderstanding sorted, Ben and Joy can now live happily ever after amongst the snow, the ice skating, and the peaceful woods happily ever after. Till the next holiday season when they must beat the theme of Mother Nature. Good luck topping that.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Wrong Teacher

Image
The Wrong Teacher All right then!  Got the most of the original Wrong crew back together again with Jessica Morris, Jason-Shane Scott, Eric Roberts, Dominique Swain and of course Ms. Vivica A. Fox in The Wrong Teacher.  Which is more The Wrong Student, but since we've used that one already, The Wrong Teacher it is.  Not that the title is completely off base because Charlotte (Morris), as an educator, isn't great. Our film opens with a woman (Swain) walking around her dark house in her lingerie, probably should put on a night gown or something, because she hears sounds.  Then she starts getting demanding texts from someone who she was obviously kicking it with, whom she wishes to kick with no more.  This person doesn't agree to this.  The woman walks around with her phone, hearing more sounds in her home because somebody's obviously in there, and I'm thinking this would be a good time to use the phones Dial Out feature to call the police, but it's not like s...
Read more

A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe

Image
  A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe (2022) - Hallmark Reviewed by Lisa Sue So the opening 10 minutes of this movie are promising. I came because of the word catastrophe in the title, but I stayed to learn who stole Grandma’s cookie recipe. I mean what Grinch of a person would do such a thing? Let me give you the set up.   Anne is a career focused MBA grad from the big city who’s just been handed the CEO role of her grandma’s cookie company, Cooper’s. Things aren’t great at Cooper’s, and Anne has been making the hard decisions like canceling the annual Cooper Christmas Light Up because they just don’t have the money, and Anne isn’t going to let Cooper’s go bankrupt, not on her watch. The day after the company holiday shin dig (which apparently wasn’t cut for budgetary reasons), Anne notices that Grandma’s cookie recipe, which had been prominently displayed without security, had been taken! The quick thinking assistant Jillian suggests they call the cops to investigate, but Anne pu...
Read more

The Wrong Cheerleader

Image
The Wrong Cheerleader Thirteen movies in I think we've kind of figured out what the Wrong Series wants to do, though I do miss the early Wrongs which featured some kind of cockamamie plan behind the psychosis.  Now the Wrong movies usually feature some unstable person, at varying levels of instability, trying to force somebody to love them via The Crazy, occasionally with a social issue buried within the almost always fractured narrative.  Today the social issue is domestic abuse, which I will say the creators did a much better job of handling than when they attempted to tackle sexual assault in 'The Wrong Friend'. Our film starts with a girl lounging by the pool at her home, minding her own business, while being observed by the ultimate representation of evil in a Wrong movie, a guy in a black hoodie.  The girl eventually retreats into her home when she hears some sounds, and like every movie ever made, she yells out 'Hello?  Is anybody there?' and like every movie...
Read more