A Gingerbread Christmas
You may not know this but I am the vice-president and treasurer of the unofficial Tiya Sircar fan club. We call ourselves the 'Bad Eleanor's', and if you get that reference then you too may be eligible for membership. Naturally, the Bad Eleanor's cover all things Tiya, such as her latest Holiday Romance Movie, as she has made a few of these, 'A Gingerbread Christmas'. An original tale about a career gal who goes back to her small town to save the family bakery and maybe find a man in the process. Yeah! And if you happen to reading this, Ms. Sircar, you still have a standing invitation to address the club any time you want to. And you don't even have to wear the special outfit we picked out for you. Unless you want to.
Hazel (Tiya) is a hard working NYC architect angling to get a big promotion, but alas her asshole boss gives the job to some other clown. His reasoning was something like 'you're just too damn hot', or something like that. I can't remember. Distraught, Hazel heads back to her tiny home town of Chicago Illinois to visit her dad (Sugith Varughese) and spend the holidays.
Things aren't so great back home either as Hazel's master baker mom has recently died, because of course she has, and her father is currently running the bakery into the dirt. Worst still is that her former high school bestie Shelby (Kyana Theresa) and current mortal enemy has opened a competing bakery across the street from her family bakery, and Shelby's bakery is straight up killing it. We'll get into why Hazel hates Shelby so much in a bit, just know that it's silly.
Also causing Hazel distress is that her dad has hired some guy named James (Marc Bendavid), an experienced master baker who is going to help fix the bakery. The old man must be paying this guy in cookies because literally nobody ever comes into this bakery. Nobody. Hazel does not like this guy. Actually, Hazel doesn't seem to like much of anybody. Ah... THAT'S why her boss didn't give her that promotion, because she doesn't get along with no damn body. Not that other thing I said, even though it's still very much true.
Hazel has a plan to save the bakery, if you can call it a plan. World famous baker Mark Clemmons, played by world famous baker Duff Goldman, has launched a Gingerbread house competition with the winner getting a cool 100 large. Hazel figures that with James' baking skills, as he has proven himself to Hazel, combined with her own architectural prowess, they could blow this competition away. The competition is going to be tough, which also includes her sworn enemy Shelby, but Hazel thinks they can do this. It's similar to my plan to fix my financial woes by hitting the Powerball.
Hazel and James get to work and gosh darn if the magic of baking montages doesn't start planting the seeds of love. James also has a delightful twelve year old daughter whose mother is inexplicably still alive somewhere and is an active part of this child's life. I think it works better in these narratives if the mother's of these kids have been killed off. It just loosens up potential future entanglements.
But alas we all know love cannot last, especially if the object of your desire happens to be Hazel because she's kind of the worst. Hazel gets super mad at James because she feels he's not taking this Hail Mary attempt to save the bakery seriously enough. I believe he said something to the effect 'If we don't win, everything will be okay'. Hazel did not like that. I mean she got so hot that she ended up accidentally breaking the awesome gingerbread house that they just completed. Which she totally blamed on James for making her do this thing. See what you made me do!
Admittedly, though the competition is like in a day, that part of the house she broke could probably be fixed but Hazel yelled at James and told him to kick rocks so all is lost. But her sage Godmother (Karen Glave), also a master baker, has an idea. Why not get her niece, Shelby, to help fix it. They both think that's a terrible idea but they give it a go. Here is where we learn the tale of the besties becoming enemies. On prom night, yes prom night, over two decades ago at least, Shelby danced with Hazel's date. We had been led to believe that Shelby stole Hazel's man in high school, which isn't cool but it was high school for goodness sakes. Now we learn that Shelby, a lesbian by the way, accepted a dance from this guy, mainly because she didn't want people in high school to know she was gay, and that hate that Hazel has for this woman has been festering in her soul like a cancer ever since that dance. Oh Hazel. And that guy who didn't give her the job in NYC changed his mind because the guy he actually hired was ass.
Anyway, the ladies fix the gingerbread house, Hazel tries to call James to apologize but he ignores the call, the contest happens, James shows up anyway because even though Hazel is absolutely the worst but he's seriously not going to do much better than that, but sadly they don't win the competition. But Hazel is a changed person now. Instead of going apeshit and completely wrecking everybody's gingerbread houses in the competition like I fully expected her to do, she graciously accepts the loss. Her and James start making out, her and Shelby forge a new friendship, she turns down the NYC job and finds an even better job in tiny town Chicago, and people start going to the bakery! I don't really know what's changed, but folks are actually there now and all is well... At Christmas!
So in the extreme glut of Hallmarky Romantic Christmas movies that we will be bombarded with this season, 'A Gingerbread Christmas' doesn't do much to separate itself from the pack, other than the fact it does have one of the better, more experienced casts that you will see in most of these movies. Not just Tiya who the fan club is obviously partial to, but truly some of the best and brightest Canada has to offer. From Sugith Varughese to Karen Glave and even Marc Bendavid who still has some leftover 'Dark Matter' cred with me, until they killed him off... spoiler alert... This is one solid cast. You may not be familiar with all these actors, but if you watch enough TV shot in Canada, you will become very familiar with their work. So when all of the movies are basically the same, the make or break is often who they convince to be in it.
The narrative, as it were, was predictable of course, but if it was anything else then it wouldn't be a Holiday Romantic movie, now would it? The vomit worthiness, however, was kind of low. Obviously we got a lot of cookie baking... a lot..., and a dead mom but we were missing most everything else. Nobody shopped for a Christmas tree, nobody decorated a Christmas tree, nobody sang any carols, no snowball fights, no one made a snowman, no near miss kisses, no ugly sweaters and I vaguely remember somebody might've drank some hot cocoa, but I can't be sure. And of course there were no Orphan kids, which is my own personal favorite. That's a lot of missing stuff, which almost disqualifies it from being a legit Hallmarky Romantic Holiday movie. What's up with that Discovery+?
Regardless, 'A Gingerbread Christmas' was arguably a little better than most of the genre, but a little low on the standards we expect.. no, DEMAND to see in our Holiday Romantic movies.
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