A Christmas Treasure

A Christmas Treasure (2021) - Hallmark

Today we will be spending some quality time with Lou (Jordin Sparks) who is a hard working reporter for her parent’s newspaper in Tiny Town USA.  It’s about a week before Christmas and Lou isn’t long for this town as she is heading for New York City right after Christmas so she can focus on writing her novel.  Personally, I can’t think of a place more serene, peaceful and completely devoid of distractions than New York City. 

Across town in Tiny Town is Kyle, as played by up and coming professional Holiday Romantic Movie Boyfriend Michael Xavier. This is like the fifth one of these I’ve seen him in.  Kyle is a chef from Chicago but is between jobs right now, meaning he’s unemployed, so he’s in Tiny Town to help his auntie Marcy (Lossen Chambers) who runs the local eatery.  In the last movie we saw, Christmas Sail, Ms. Chambers ran the local bakery and now we’re wondering if Lossen Chambers can cook for real. 

There’s a lot going on in Tiny Town right now as they are prepping for the Christmas festival and also have unearthed the 100 year old time capsule.  Inside this capsule is a lamp that belonged to Lou’s great grandfather, a mystery Lou is determined to solve before she heads off to New York.  There are also songs to sing because, you know, Jordin Sparks is in your movie.  But Lou is actually too busy to sing the songs this year, so this task is being passed down to her bestie and sister-in-law who looks to be 22 months pregnant.  We’re thinking that baby is going to prevent her from singing these songs she’s been practicing.

Meanwhile, Lou and Kyle keep running into each other in Tiny Town, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise because the town is tiny.  Kyle used to spend every Christmas there with his auntie, who inspired him to become a chef.  Lou also loves auntie Marcy for she's the one who inspired her to become a writer.  It seems to me that these two probably should’ve met already, at some point in their shared Tiny Town history, but whatever. 

Anyway, these cute kids are Christmas tree shopping together, cocoa drinking, hot bun eating, gift buying, taking long walks, engaging in deep conversations, eating special dinners… just get a room already.   But alas, she’s going to New York and he’s lining up his next Chicago chef gig so love just cannot be.  But what if, one day, you realize it doesn’t matter where you are, but who you’re with?  Did you know that one can write anywhere?  And what if, one day, you realize that true cooking inspiration doesn’t come from huge populated cities, but small towns that hardly anybody lives in?  Now love can happen… at Christmas.

So, there are a lot of moving parts in A Christmas Treasure, most of which I did not care about.  I didn’t care about the beacon, which I think was magic, which was put in the time capsule a hundred years ago.  There’s also a lot of rigmarole about what to put in the new time capsule which I also didn’t care about.  I didn’t really care about Lou trying to go to New York in her attempts to be a novelist because I knew she wasn’t going to make it to New York, but I was somewhat invested in Kyle and his Nouvelle Cuisine cooking style, which I believe is less about how food tastes and more about how food looks on the plate, which seems terrible to me.  However Kyle is going to change all of that, by the way, by combining delicious comfort food with Nouvelle design.  Imagine, if you will, a dish with three ornate meat balls, set an inch part, with a drizzle of gravy on the side, next to a tablespoon of mashed potato shaped like flower.  Good luck with that Kyle. 

What I did care about though was listening to Jordin Sparks sing, and as such she blessed us with three songs.  Some song she sang with her super pregnant sister-in-law in the beginning which I can’t remember, O Holy Night in the middle, which is a song one absolutely has to have some vocal talent to get through, and she closed the show with the Donnie Hathaway classic ‘This Christmas’ which is often in the discussion as the greatest Christmas song ever written.

But alas, this isn’t a Jordin Sparks Christmas Concert Movie, but a Hallmarky Romantic Holiday movie and to that end I guess it was fine.  I guess.  True, I wasn’t particularly invested in Lou and Kyle eventually finding love, but that’s okay because there was cookie baking, Christmas tree shopping, Christmas tree decorating, lots of background Christmas music and decorations, and all kinds of Christmassy food products and of course Jordin singing.   

We’re still missing things in these movies though.  I mean I’m six movies deep so far in this season’s crop and I have yet to see a single snowman or a snowball fight!  Or Mistletoe!  Did the pandemic break the supply chain of Snow making machines and plastic mistletoe?  What the heck?  There were also no Orphan Kids in this movie, or any kids for that matter except for somebody’s random baby, and the movie was almost completely devoid of wise old people.  Lou’s parents and the aunt are older, heck, I’m older, but I’m not wise, I’m dumb so they don’t count. 

The season is just getting started and there’s going to be another 100+ of these (no joke) coming our way in the next month so I would understand if you wanted to skip this one, but this will be the only one where you can hear Jordin sing. 

Three vomits!




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