(courtesy St. Martin’s Griffin)
This seems to be the Christmas for festive romcoms with cleverly out-there premises and one of the best so far has to be Christmas People by Iva-Marie Palmer.
In this sparklingly fun but emotionally grounded novel, Jill Jacobs, a wannabe screenwriter based in L.A. who’s had nothing like the success she envisaged when she moved to the city three years earlier, finally consents to go home to Powell Park in the Chicago area for a family Christmas.
The reason for her reluctance to go back to her hometown, which has seen better days, has little to do with her family – they are lovingly dysfunctional, like all the best families are, and her mother has been urging her daughter to end her boycott of family Christmases every year Jill has stayed away.
No, the reason for her reluctance to celebrate the festive season with loved ones has everything to do with the fact that she might see her ex, Grant, an ambitious chef who left for New York City to further his career and whose departure, seemingly without asking Jill to come with, triggered their break-up.
To be fair, Jill was the one who pulled the pin, fearing that Grant never really loved her and that this was proof that he didn’t really want to be in a relationship; they never really talked it over and so all Jill has now are regrets, discomfort and an endless nagging worry that she’ll see him in the bakers or the deli or wherever and have to enjoy awkward, pointless conversation.
I almost forgot how many people I’d have to avoid in Powell Park, my very own ghosts of Christmas past.
It’s going to be a long visit.
Or worse, he will want to have a proper post-mortem and Jill honestly would rather do anything than go down that relationship grave exhuming road.
Even so, to her great surprise, she agrees to head home this year, facing some big questions about her career including if she can lower herself to write a romcom for the Heartfelt Channel – and yes, it is meant to be a doppelgänger for that other “H” company – something her agent is keen for her to do to save what little is little of her Hollywood writing career.
It seems the sensible course of action, what with the slew of dead-end menial jobs Jill has taken on to make ends meet, but Jill isn’t sure if she can stomach giving up her high-concept scripts in favour of giving the people what they want, which is, it turns out, the same romcom movie over and over in different Christmassy disguises.
She feels, rightly or wrongly – quite wrongly, opines her gay bestie Zav who thinks Jill is tenacious and loyal and all kinds of good and laudable things – that her life is a big, fat failure, her career dead on the ground, her friendship with her childhood BFF Allie withered to nothing and Grant looming like the Ghost of Romance Past every time she so much as thinks of Powell Park.
And now she has to go and do Christmas which she hates.
(courtesy official author site)
But something happens in the midst of her chaotic visit home.
After a drunken night trying to forget how bad her life is and actually seeing Grant, who is actually pretty nice, but through Jill’s skewed focus, he will never be okay, Jill wakes up to find herself smack bang in the middle of a Christmas Heartfelt Channel movie version of her hometown, now renamed Sweetville.
Where Powell Park was down-at-heel and run-of-the-mill suburban ordinary, Sweetville is perfectly curated Christmas decorations, the old six-lane highway bisecting Jill’s hometown transformed into a cosy two-lane main street with adorable shops, and cocoa the only option, in a myriad variety of flavours and looks the only drink in town.
The air smells of cinnamon and peppermint, everyone seems calm and ridiculously happy and people seem to fall in love at the drop of a hat, their rapid reunions the key to fixing all the things that ails them.
It’s a perfect place at the most wonderful time of the year and, after some sage words from a mysterious Santa figure who seems to always be watching from afar, Jill realises her only way out is to play her role and fall in love – will it be with hunky baker and former high school crush Cory or her single and available and still very much in love with her ex, Grant? – and live happily Heartfelt everafter.
But is Jill really the sort of person to fall in love in a such a hothouse festive environment?
Corey is where my energies have to be concentrated. Still, I can’t help but eat Grant’s admission up.
It tastes delicious.
Well, she has no choice but to find out, taking part in a Christmas cookie baking contest with both Grant and Corey and hoping that she will fall in love with someone, preferably Corey, and get back to reality; although to be fair that’s not exactly glowing with success so does she really want that?
Life in Sweetville, with its capacity for healing past hurts and reforging lost connection, and maybe even falling in love, might just be the best thing to happen to her.
What happens to Jill must be left to the reading because while things do get better, it’s how and where they get better that’s the fun part in Christmas People which fantastically original, genuinely heartfelt – and the lower case kind though the upper case variety is also very much in play – and spiritedly funny, not to mention brilliantly imaginative.
Palmer takes an admittedly out-there concept and grounds in some very affecting human moments while serving up a festive love story, or is that a re-love story that comes with hearty festive helpings of redemption, healing and life-changing self-awareness with sass and cynicism thrown in for good measure.
Christmas People has it all – all the Christmasness you could ask for and tons more, some raw, broken humanity because real life doesn’t go away just because you aim for the stars and fall in love, and a promise that, contrary to what you might think, do-overs are possible and way more satisfying and transformative than you ever gave them credit for, especially at Christmas.