Today's Feature: Every Christmas Has A Story
A TV personality who hates Christmas has her life changed by a small town's magic.
TV's Lori Loughlin plays Kate Harper, the host of a very successful nationally broadcast morning news show on everybody's favorite cable news network, (insert name here). The holiday season has arrived, and it's making poor Kate miserable, because get this: the lady doesn't like Christmas. It's not like the logline above gave that away, or anything. There's a whole story behind that, involving her deadbeat dad and a creepy little doll, but I'll come back around to that in the fullness of time. For now, all you need to know is that this Kate Harper lady is not a fan of Christmas, and that's all there is to that.
On her final show of the year, Kate accidentally assaults her final guest, a flamboyant young man in a festive sweater vest who just loves unusual Christmas ornaments and can't fight the powerful compulsion to share his adoration for these little dangling wonders with the world. I say "accidentally", but let's be honest, here. She didn't want to interview the grinning little elf in the first place, and her deep-seated resentment for Christmas probably manifested itself in a subconscious attack on this unsuspecting admirer of her most despised of all holidays, so I doubt it was really an accident.
This incident occurs while the show's end credits are rolling, and her microphone is supposed to be dead, but a careless technician leaves it on at the worst possible moment, and a national audience is allowed to eavesdrop on this supposedly private conversation. At first, Kate very politely declines the collector's gift of a chintzy angel ornament, but this pushy dummy keeps trying to unload his goofy little bauble on her, until she loudly admits that she doesn't want the ornament because she doesn't have a Christmas tree because she doesn't like Christmas, then she "accidentally" punches the guy in the face, and he goes sprawling into the set's Christmas tree, and the whole world looks on in horror.
In an effort to mitigate the damage of this accidental broadcast and save her star personality's career, the network director forces Kate and her producer Jack Webster (played by Colin Ferguson, whom I remember fondly from the sometimes-better-than-just-okay SyFy original Series Eureka, but most people probably recognize from his portrayal of various anthropomorphic kitchen appliances from the recent Maytag advertising campaign) to cover the seasonal festivities at Hollyvale, North Dakota, the most Christmas-obsessed little town in America, in a week-long series dubbed "Kate Harper Finds Her Christmas Spirit". Both Kate and Jack reluctantly agree, because they both enjoy making money and would rather not be unemployed for the holidays.
Now Jack and Kate used to be something of an item back in their freewheeling college days, until Kate decided not to follow her paramour out to the wilds of Vermont where he secured his first on-air journalism gig, choosing to forge her own path somewhere in New Mexico, and they were only recently reunited in Los Angeles when Jack replaced Kate's previous producer, and that's gotta be awkward, right? Of course, Jack never fell out of love with Kate and every single time he looks at her, his eyes well up with tears because he remembers how she broke his heart all those years ago, but he's always ready to forgive her and move back in with her because he's basically a big loyal dog in man-form, but Kate is more of a cat person, so maybe it's not meant to be.
There's a mystery afoot in the picturesque little town of Hollyvale, however, and when intrepid reporter Kate and her ardent producer Jack finally get to the bottom of it, they will be rocked to their very foundations, and absolutely nothing will ever be the same again. Because the charming faces of the citizens of Hollyvale are hiding something sinister behind their too-big smiles, and it all leads back to their town's missing Christmas tree, a big, beautiful monument to holiday joy that once stood in the center of their town square every year since the foundation of Hollyvale in the late 19th Century, but has been missing for the last two years, and seemingly nobody knows where it went. Two years ago, the tree, which was routinely delivered from upstate, just never showed up, and the town has never been the same since, because a giant Christmas tree-shaped piece of their seasonal jigsaw puzzle has been missing, and celebrating the joyous Yuletide just doesn't feel quite right anymore.
I'm not kidding, by the way. That's the big plot of the movie. This captivating little town is missing its big Christmas tree, and Holly & Jack try to find out where it went. That's literally why the mayor of Hollyvale, a grubby little pissant played by Bruce Harwood (the least popular of The X-Files' resident lovable conspiracy theorists The Lone Gunmen) petitioned Kate's network to cover the holidays in his town, because he wanted her to find out why they stopped getting their Christmas trees delivered on time. Not because nobody knows, of course, considering this prick knows exactly why, but he can't say anything to Kate because he doesn't want to spoil the mystery for the hard nosed reporter and her tag-along producer maybe-not-quite boyfriend, and he encourages everyone else in town to keep their traps shut as well, because this guy's an asshole.
What's the big mystery? You see, the town was founded by the Hollis family a long time ago, and those Hollises loved Christmas so much that they wrote into their town charter that a Christmas tree from Hollis land would decorate the town square every year, in perpetuity, as long as a Hollis delivered the actual tree, which the last remaining member of the family, a recluse named Vernon Hollis, has neglected to do for two years running. So what's it all about, Alfie? Poor Vernon's beloved wife, who adored the family tradition with all her heart, died three years prior in a car accident on her way into town to attend the annual tree-lighting ceremony, and old Vernon (played by Willy Aames, Scott Baio's leering crony in 1982's classic paean to sexual assault, Zapped!) just didn't feel like delivering the trees anymore.
Everybody in town knew this, and they didn't tell Kate or Jack because the mayor wanted to make it all a challenge for the reporter. He thought she would enjoy the thrill of the hunt, so to speak, and he basically coerced all of his fellow townspeople to play along in an extended live action role playing game for the benefit of a grieving widower and a pair of strangers from Los Angeles. Okay, why? Because the mayor figured Kate could have a little talk with Vernon, convince him to start delivering the Christmas trees again, and then both parties would miraculously have their Christmas spirit restored and all would be right with the world. That was this gremlin's plan. And luckily it worked, because after a two minute conversation with Vernon where Kate reminds him how much his late wife loved the Hollyvale Christmas Tree and that continuing the tradition would be an excellent way to honor her memory, Vernon drops off a brand new tree for the town square on Christmas Eve and...
I'm sorry, but this is offensively stupid. It took Kate, a complete stranger with absolutely no connection to this man or anything in town, to convince Vernon Hollis to continue the town's time-honored tradition of providing the town his ancestors founded with a Christmas tree. Not the mayor, who was so close to Vernon all throughout their lives that Vernon considered the man his brother and named him best man at his wedding? This fucking goblin couldn't be bothered to trek up to his best friend's house at any point before the events of this movie and have a heart-to-heart conversation with the man. Instead, he depends upon the words of somebody he doesn't know from Adam to convince his so-called "brother" to get re-involved in the community that loves and misses him so dearly. And everybody in town just goes along with this plan.
It took a complete fucking stranger to convince Vernon Hollis that maybe ending the tradition that his wife cherished so deeply might not be the best way to honor her memory. This plot is the heart and soul of Every Christmas Has A Story, and it is abhorrent in the extreme. My mind just refuses to accept this. Were the people of Hollyvale too fucking cowardly to ever actually have a conversation with Vernon Hollis? Did they just not want to bother with the poor man and his troubles? And what about the fucking mayor? Vernon's best friend couldn't bother trying to get through to him over three years of solitude and grief? No, he needed news coverage from a nationally-broadcast cable network, not to mention a massive assist from some dupe reporter who found herself in an untenable position and was desperate to save her career to actually reach out to his closest friend in the entire world, because Hollyvale was in dire need of some precious tourist spending. There's your fucking Christmas spirit, right there. With friends like that, who needs friends?
Is there any point in discussing this movie any further? What else is there to say? Wait, I forgot about Kate's deadbeat dad! Yeah, her daddy bought his little girl a shitty doll for Christmas when she was seven years-old, then he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. But now that he's an old man and he's going to die soon, he wants to worm his way back into his daughter's life, so he's been sending her a bunch of sappy letters and old Polaroids of happier times with his little girl, and he even shows up in Hollyvale to beg her forgiveness, so of course she takes her daddy back, because never mind the decades of emotional scarring this selfish motherfucker's act left on an innocent little girl's psyche; it's Christmas! He said he was sorry and he'll never do it again!
Kate admitted earlier in the movie that despite wanting to follow Jack to Vermont and start a real life together, her abandonment issues caused her to flee from her own happiness, and now she fears she's too damaged to give the man she still loves her whole heart. This is serious shit, but let's sweep it all under the fucking rug because we need a happy ending. Daddy said he loved her, and he even dressed up as Santa Claus and threw out little candy canes to a bunch of children and waved to them so he's a completely changed man and now everything's fine and Kate's ready to love again. It's a Christmas miracle! What a fucking joke.
This movie is so insipid, so ludicrous, and so grotesque, that I can't believe it actually got made. Who thought this was a good story to share with the world? The story sends so many terrible messages to its audience, and apparently nobody in any position of power at any point during this film's development saw any problems with any of it. And it's all presented with such a charming little façade, with some very good performances from its principal cast, and decent location photography and production design, so it looks and sounds so inviting, like cuddling up by a roaring fireplace underneath a warm blanket with a steaming mug of hot cocoa in your hands on a cold winter's night. But your chimney flue is blocked by a bloated owl corpse, and deadly carbon monoxide is slowly filling your home, and as you drift off to sleep you don't even realize that you're already doomed, because that oh-so inviting roaring fireplace is killing you with every mesmerizing orange-yellow flicker of flame that dances across your increasingly heavy-lidded gaze.
VERDICT: FUCK YOU
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