(courtesy Hachette Australia)
When you’re diving into a festive rom-com read, you hope and pray that you’ll be served up lashings of magical romance and renewal and healing in bountiful measure.
That’s precise you get in the magnificently heartwarming joy and wonder that is Christmas is All Around by Martha Waters; what you also get though is snappily fun dialogue, a main character who hates Christmas and isn’t afraid to snarkily and often wittily make that clear, and some real moments of authentic emotional intimacy that add some moving emotional heft to this festive fairytale delight.
The emotional centre of Christmas is All Around is Charlotte who HATES Christmas.
She’s not a Grinch as such though she’s often not that far off it, and she’s certainly no Scrooge, though again she does find her relatives – older sister Ava, husband Kit, his parents and her sic-month-old niece Alice a little trying at times, but Charlotte, who’s popped over from her home in New York to London for six weeks, definitely does not do festive.
The big question is – what could have possibly made an otherwise fun and artistically successful 29-year-old get so curmudgeonly when it comes to what many regard as the most wonderful time of the year?
Well, Charlotte, daughter of a movie director and playwright, the marriage of whom is all narcissistic ups and downs (which tries and exhausts Charlotte and Ava), starred in a festive film when she was nine, the much-loved Christmas, Truly, which is up for a reboot.
‘I [Kit] know you were a bit traumatized [sic] by Christmas, Truly, but surely you don’t need to be prejudiced against the entire genre?’
‘I do,’ Charlotte insisted. ‘Because Christmas romances are bad. The meet-cutes under implausible circumstances! The elbaorate festive tasks that require the protagonists to join forces and discover the joy of Christmas! The quirky, borderline-contrived Christmas rituals! The meddling supporting characters! The third-act fights! The sudden, improbable snowfalls! Kissing in front of the Christmas trees! It is all terrible.’
All of the original cast have signed on but not Charlotte – she hates the film and feels like it’s albatross around her adult neck at a time when she’s trying to forge her own creative path in life – and not to put too fine a point on it, the online world HATES her for it.
The only solution she can see is to flee her home city, head to the UK away from the majority of the film’s fans and hope she can return in the new year to a calmed down situation.
Ah, if only life was that straightforward and easy.
It turns out that life is laughing at her from a great and suspiciously familiar festive height and not long after arriving in London she is whisked away by Christmas LOVING Ava, who is determined to do ALL the festive things, to a gorgeous old home in Hampshire called Eden Priory where, wouldn’t you know it, a key scene from Christmas, Truly was filmed.
Charlotte doesn’t clock this immediately though, and it’s only when wanders into the room where the filming occurred that she realises she has not only NOT escaped the ghosts of Christmas, Truly past but that she’s walked straight into one of the movie’s most beloved physical locations.
What’s a Christmas averse girl to do? Well, hide away, of course but while she’s doing that, and sketching out a scene in her hideaway alcove, in wanders a handsome curly-haired man in glasses who blithely proceeds to strip out of the reindeer suit he’s wearing for the night’s festive festivities.
(courtesy official author site)
That might be that, a few hilariously awkward comments and more than a little snarky chemistry, but then events conspire to leave Charlotte in need of a lift back to London which, oh rom-com gods rejoice, is provided by the now-de-reindeered Graham who, it turns out, is the son of the home’s owners.
They get talking , not just in the car but later on in a cafe, and Charlotte agrees, despite her trenchant antipathy to the season, to do a series of sketches for Eden Priory which they will use to bolster their festive acitivities which are the only thing keeping the money pit of a house up and running.
The irony of diving headfirst into a Christmas commission is not lost on Charlotte, but she agrees to it, providing Christmas is All Around with just the right narrative driver to keep our two soon-to-be-lovers spiralling into each other’s arms.
Both are scarred by previous relationships gone wrong, and separated, initially at least, by the fact that Charlotte hates the seaosn while Graham, and sisters Eloise and Lizzie does not – he also needs it to keep the family home afloat and he knows, though he doesn’t let on (uh-oh!), that Charlotte is the star of Christmas, Truly (she goes out of her way not to admit to that) and her presence could turbocharge his family’s fundraising activities.
She was twenty-nine, she [Charlotte] reminder herself. It had been four years since her last heartbreak–she was older, wiser, and wouldn’t be making those same mistakes again.
Perhaps if she repeated it to herself often enough, she’d start to believe it.
What makes Christmas is All Around sing too is how meta it all is.
While it is very much a festive rom-com, Waters has enormous fun sending them up too, with Charlotte and Graham knowingly noting that certain events that happen to them are straight out of a thousand, mainly badly done, festive flicks.
Waters has a lot of fun with this but thankfully never missteps – save for a possible unnecessary argument near the end which might be a piece of rom-com trope royalty but feels a little shoehorned in to a story that frankly was so strong it didn’t need that particular cliche – meaning that Christmas is All Around might have a laugh, and a charmingly intelligent one at that, at the genre it occupies but never to the point where it loses the romantically escapist fun of the season.
The great fun of Christmas, Truly of course is that Charlotte ends up living out the very thing she hates, and much of the boisterously fizzy and dialogue-rich story pivots around that great irony, delivering up a festive rom-com that is everything you coudl ask for in this type of seasonal tale but with some knowing in-jokes too.
Christmas is All Around is a gem – it serves what we need in a Christmas rom-com which is all the transportively escapist magic, wonder and romance of the season, gives us characters who are smart, sassy and endlessly funny, and serves up an ending that might tick all the expected boxes but in a way that feels fresh and original and as wonderful to open and read as the best presents on the day itself.