Christmas has been long revered for its capacity to bring about new beginnings.
Well, imagined new beginnings, anyway; while we might want it to fix reality and reshape our lives in the festive buoyancy and hopeful possibility of the season, the truth is that it often doesn’t do that outside popular culture.
But thank goodness then that we have those kinds of escapist moments of festive joy to disappear into like Highlands Christmas: Wishes Come True by Amy Quick Parrish, a short and sweet story that takes us on a seasonally restorative journey with American Melissa MacKenzie who finds herself alone just a month before the holidays when her husband Dave announces he’s having an affair and he wants the marriage ended and the martial home all to himself.
It’s a devastating blow for the interior designer who loved her cosy domestic bliss in Boston, but after getting a letter that informs her she’s inherited a gorgeous old pile in the Scotland, thanks to a deceased unknown and distant relative, she packs her bags, and rather impulsively, moves across the Atlantic to what she hopes will be her new life.
At the airport, she meet-cutes Scottish-American lawyer, Colin McGregor who is on her flight to Edinburgh, then her train to Inverness and finally to the new town where she hopes life will start all over again.
Yes, it’s a ton of coincidences, and it does strains the bounds of credibility just a little, but this is a festive romcom after all which, even more than their year-round genremates, like to pile on the narrative conveniences so we can be delivered the gift of a giddily escapist Christmas.
Melissa shook her head. ‘You think of everything.’
‘I think we’re just on the same wavelength.’
Lindsay [Colin’s sister and Melissa’s new BFF] spread out an array of colored [sic] candles and peppermint sticks while Melissa made the frosting.
As they decorated cookies and listened to Christmas music, it began to snow again.
What we haven’t mentioned yet, and which is more than a little awkward, is that Colin, all handsome and capable in a way that makes Melissa swoon, is Dave’s lawyer which should immediately have the newest immigrant to Scotland, running for the hills and far away from the warm and lovely McGregor clan who fold her into their family and community Christmas celebrations without a beat and who make it clear that all her second chances sit with them in this town and in the new house she hopes she can call her own.
But, and yes, my festively escapist friends, there must always be a “but” in any romcom, and especially one set at Christmas, the house may not be entirely hers, and with the help of the McGregors, she’ll have to fight to keep a hold of the home at the centre of her unexpected new life.
The fun of Highlands Christmas: Wishes Come True is that it’s all wildly improbable with no thoughts by Melissa of checking in with lawyers on either the home or her immigrant status, and no sense that maybe cosying up to her husband’s divorce lawyer is a good idea, but at the end of the way, the novella is quick and fun slice of festive escapism that surges with a bubbly sense that life can get better after the most traumatic of circumstances.
Diving into Highlands Christmas: Wishes Come True, which will take you no time to read at all, is a perfect way to take some time out of your busy festive schedule, to soak up the possibilities and hope of the season, festive and otherwise, and to embrace the idea that for all its busyness and demands that Christmas can be a time of love and healing and renewal and that maybe getting right away from it all is just the way to make that happen.
(courtesy official author Facebook page)