CHRISTMAS AROUND THE CORNER (2018)

Claire (Alexandra Breckenridge) is a venture capitalist whose latest IPO for a company called Mistletoe doesn't launch well. It's almost December and she has a lot of vacation time stacked up so to relax and recharge, she decides to take the month off and head to a small town of Glastenbury, Vermont, famous for its Christmas celebration. Her late mother talked a lot about her visits to the town, but the two of them never got to go together. When she gets to town, she discovers two things: 1) the bed & breakfast at which she is booked is above the Fortenbury Bookstore and part of the arrangement is that she will work as a kind of co-manager with Mrs. Tumulty, the manager (Jane Alexander) while she's there; 2) the town council has cancelled the Christmas displays because of a catastrophic flood earlier in the year, and the small business owners are all feeling a bit depressed because of the lack of tourists. Claire, being good at marketing, starts sprucing up the dusty bookstore and trying to get the town back in the Christmas spirit, and she makes a third discovery: Mrs. Tumulty's nephew, who owns the bookstore building, is a hunky blacksmith named Andrew (Jamie Spilchuk). Sparks fly between the two until she makes a fourth discovery: Andrew is selling the building to the head of the town council who plans on getting rid of the bookstore. By now, Claire has a lot invested in the store and she puts up a fight for its future.

The pluses of this Lifetime Christmas romance: Breckenridge and Spilchuk are easy on the eyes and have a nice rapport; the bookstore setting is fun (especially for me as I used to work in retail bookselling); two of the supporting characters are an Anglican priest and his African-American husband (and their new baby)! However, there are minuses: Jane Alexander, who I normally love, is wasted as her character is basically just an onlooker; the ending is rushed; and the plot is driven by what seems to me to be a ridiculously preposterous notion, that a B&B guest would be expected to help manage a retail establishment. I can't believe that the writer (Michael J. Murray), who seems to specialize in Christmas TV-movies, couldn't come up with a better plot device, like having Claire be related to someone (other than Andrew) at the bookstore. I had a hard time getting past this, but I admit the presence of the same-sex couple—who show up in several scenes and who would never make it into a Hallmark film—made me eventually warm to the movie. [Lifetime]