Christmas is often described as a magical time of year but the word is more commonly used to suggest atmosphere and sensibility than actual supernatural influencing of time and events.
But in Once Upon a December by Amy E. Reichert, Yule time is literally magical, a place where an alleyway called the Julemarked, full of festive shops including a bakery, a bookshop and knitted and wooden handicrafts, appears in a Christmas market in some city in the world, serves busy customers eager to soak up everything it has to offer and who, when the narrow passageway disappears, don’t recall it ever being there at all.
That’s some mind-wiping magicality going on there, and it’s where Astra Noel Snow, one of the chief librarians of the Milwaukee City library system goes on day with her besties – Ronnie, Steph and Cassie whom she’s known since they bonded like family back in college days – and meets the mysteriously charming Jack Clausen who, along with his three brothers, makes pastries that are beyond delectable and which bring Jack and Astra together with a frisson that is so palpable it cannot be forgotten.
Only Astra keeps forgetting, year after year that the Brigadoon of Christmas appears and then disappears; one moment she is enthralled by Jack’s quite human charm and likability, the two drawn together like jubilant moths to a festive flame, and the next, she’s forgotten, like everyone else that Jack was there in the first place.
The festiveness in the air was contagious and was why he loved living in the Julemarked. The cheer hung in the air like garland, connecting people together through the Christmas spirit. At the Julemarked, this was his everyday life. Everyone living in anticipation of family and feasting and gift giving. Generosity and kindness, laughter and song. Something about those magical days leading up to Christmas brought out the best in humanity.
There’s nothing evil about Jack’s snow-covered, tree-filled home where it is Christmas all year round; it simply exists out of time, appearing repeatedly each year at those markets it chooses to a pattern not even its inhabitants can discern, and when it does connect with somewhere on the physical plane, it stays for all of December until, on Christmas Eve, it vanishes back into the tinsel-draped ether from which it came.
Which, as you can appreciate, makes dating anyone outside of its mystical surrounds a challenging undertaking but one which Jack eventually decided he has no choice to embark on as he is drawn to Astra time and again, their paths meeting in ways that cannot be coincidental and which suggest a greater power at work.
While Jack is trying to work out where his destiny lies – he is blissfully happy in perpetual Christmas and the communal bonhomie it engenders among people who age nothing like those on the outside – Astra is dealing with more grounded concerns such as gaining full custody of her beloved dog Bernie from her douchebag of an ex, Trent, and trying to reconnect with her besties after her coercively controlled marriage led to the kind of social isolation she once believed unthinkable.
They literally come from two different worlds, and yet Christmas being Christmas, in this case, literally and actually magical, it seems like they are preordained, by happenstance and the finding of a Hans Christian Anderson tome alike, to somehow be together – the million glasses of mulled wine question is HOW?
The capitalisation is solely due to the fact that their romance, which happens over fifteen years with only Jack’s full cognisance of its existence over that time – if that sounds creepy, it is absolutely not; Jack is a gentleman and a sweet, caring man, the very soul of a perfect romantic comedy leading man – comes with all kinds of loaded questions.
Not the least of which, and which dominates the second half of Once Upon a December, how one chronologically normal person and one who exists outside time’s very worst ravages can possibly stay together even as love cements their bond in an ever more solid fashion.
Theirs is a love for the tinsel-draped ages, and Reichert brings it giddily alive with snappy dialogue (with only the occasional overwrought, clunky passage), characters who pop off the page lie twinkling lights on overdrive and a premise which she absolutely delivers on with real consequential humanity.
After all, magical as Jack and Astra’s relationship might be and as right as it might feel, they are still bound by some very basic grounded concerns – Jack doesn’t want to leave the Julemarked where life is bucolically perfect (and perhaps a little lonely if he’s truly honest) and Astra can’t imagine abandoning her loving family and her besties with whom she is tighter than tight and who are there for each other no matter what.
‘We need more pictures of us,’ Astra said, holding the phone up for him to see. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face in the picture. Her lashes were still a bit dewy, her cheeks flushed. Did she want more pictures because she wanted to cherish this fleeting time with him? She wads right; with his long life, he had become complacent, forgetting to treasure important moments, always assuming there would be more. Tonight proved that was no guarantee, and he wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
There is, as might now be evident a major conundrum driving Once Upon a December which surges with all kinds of merry and brightness, its pages vivaciously awash in Christmasness of the most luminously lovely kind.
The setting for this festive rom-com is sublime, with its descriptions of gilded trees and stalls selling all manner of wonderful Christmas items, and a sense of life being more possible and beautiful than it is in the other 11 months of the year, and it’s easy to keep reading for this atmospheric loveliness alone.
But Once Upon a December is more than just a delightfully rendered ode to the most wonderful time of the year, evoking all the things many people love about the season; it’s the story of two people, one with a magical world at his feet and perfection of human experience at his fingertips and the other longing for a place to belong and feel happy that exists beyond the strong familial and friendship links she already has in soul-affirming abundance.
Astra and Jack need each other and it’s clear from every page in this artfully-written rom-com that that’s the case, but how they’ll make their love last beyond 24 days every few Decembers when the Julemarked chooses to materialise in Milwaukee is a whole other thing and one which fills this love letter to Christmas in all its wonder and merriment with a burning question of where fate may take the two lovers who face an impossible choice.
Once Upon a December is a clever, thoroughly imaginative premise brought gloriously and engagingly to life, a rom-com that is in as much love with the season as Jack and Astra are with each other, and which knows that real love is worth fighting for, even if it might mean going against the ephemeral nature of temporal life and trying to make something last the distance, even if it costs them everything to do so.