#anyways enjoy a good ol Festival piece! I posted the original DAY OF which is wild | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sleepykittypaws · 3 years

Text

Deliver By Christmas

Original Air Date: October 25, 2020 (Hallmark Movies & Mysteries) Where to Watch?: Hallmark will replay it multiple times this season, and for every season in perpetuity

Eion Bailey and Alvina August have both been secondary characters in past Hallmark movies, but are new to leading roles this season. The pair had good chemistry and liked that both were a bit outside the standard Hallmark hero/heroine mold.

Also very much enjoyed how this Shop Around the Corner-inspired story shook up the standard Hallmark formula, at least a bit. Bailey's widower single dad isn't looking for love, but finds himself drawn to cookie baker August while they both help plan a town Christmas celebration.

Could have done without some of the more scholocky military elements, as Hallmark seems to have injected far too many of this season's offerings with a big ole dose of military propaganda. One or two heart-tuggers are good, a half dozen or more starts to feel as if the Army, like Campbell’s, is Hallmark’s latest sponsor, and as much as I like Hallmark movies, this shouldn’t be how our tax dollars are used.

Do appreciate how the actual sponsorship in this one, from Build-a-Bear Workshop, which co-produced this movie, was at least reasonably subtle, and worked into the plot, unlike Christmas with the Darlings five-minute ad for tomato soup.

But here we have, once again, a baker who knows nothing about baking. The movie opens with her tossing delicate, frosted cookies willy nilly into giant boxes with no parchment in between them, basically guaranteeing they will become broken, stuck together messes long before they reach her customers.

She later bakes gingerbread pieces four at a time—not even enough for one full house—all by herself, for the big town festival, and when her sister delivers everything in one trip, we see about four frosting bags and enough cookies to construct maybe two complete houses. So, that should be fun for an entire community's worth of kids.

I would need to make more cookies for my immediate family than she delivers for an entire town. Which is why I formally request a moratorium on bakers as leads in these movies until someone at Hallmark figures out how cookies work. Cause if that was the mystery in this Mysteries and Movies entry, it was definitely not solved.

Not to harp but gingerbread houses were always a terrible festival plan. (see also: Never Kiss a Man in a Christmas Sweater.) They're expensive, take forever to finish, and are difficult to construct, leading to breakage, frustrated little ones and general nightmare stuff people running even a moderately-sized festival would definitely want to avoid.

August also closes her downtown small business during the festival—arguably the busiest, most bustling time of the season. If these are the types of business decisions August's character regularly makes, no wonder she never has a single customer, beyond "phone orders," the entire film.

Beyond all the baking nonsense, time is elastic in this one. When they say they specifically have five hours until the festival, they build a massive snow fort that would take two people, conservatively, four days in real life to construct, plus tackle five other projects, all with time to spare. Also, the instant they get done with the fort, they stop playing…Cause that’s how kids work.

Anyway, despite my gripes, do like the sweetness of this story, which is extra gentle, even for Hallmark, and had a dreamy quality to it—and not just because of the time quandaries.

Hated the mistaken identity, misunderstanding nonsense, but liked all the near miss meetings and silly spying from August and her sister, played by Nadeen Lightbody. I also still teared up a little at the end when they do finally meet, and was moved by Bailey's social media post about how much this movie meant to him, personally. I, too, am still appreciating Hallmark’s newfound diversity this season.

Far from perfect, but a pleasant little holiday confection.

Final Judgement: A fairly generous 3 Paws Up

0 notes