Eve (Kristin Davis) is a workaholic, ambitious stockbroker with no time for family or relationships (in fact, she claims to be in a long distance relationship… with her future boyfriend. That’s REALLY long distance!) and really no time for Christmas shenanigans.

So when she dies, her guardian angel Pearl (Shirley MacLaine), sends her back to Earth as a Christmas angel, to really stick it to her. She’s got the one week before Christmas to make a difference in someone’s life. That someone is a relative stranger, someone she once shared a cab with, a diner owner named Max (Eric McCormack) who dreamed of being a musician before he unexpectedly became a parent when his sister died and left her daughter in his care.

Anyway, it’s difficult to follow the usual Hallmark formula of :
1. learn to love Christmas; 2. fall in love
when you’re dead. I mean, fraternization between the live and the dead is difficult and frowned upon, and since she’s (hopefully) on her way, this would be an even longer distance than the potential future boyfriend. And there’s that pesky rule about not getting involved. That’s a toughie. And how much are his buddies going to tease him if he tells them he has a Ghost Girlfriend? It’s an awkward situation. God, they’re going to wish they were fighting over cabs again.

But at least there’s plenty of Christmas along the way: cookies, snowfall, trees, pageants, even caroling, and you know how much I hate caroling! And by the way, here in Ottawa, the local radio station is running a very age-ist contest. You have to bring a Christmas Carol (literally just a man or woman named Carol) to the pedestrian mall to possibly win 5k. Except honestly, who under 50 is named Carol anymore? No one, that’s who! This is pretty much the dumbest idea for a contest they’ve ever had, and believe me, they’ve had some doozies.

Anyway. Like all Hallmark movies, you can guess what’ll happen within the first 45 seconds, and the rest is just tinsel on your tree. Of course there two kinds of people: those who put tinsel on their tree, and those who don’t. I think tinsel is largely falling out of favour, but my mother was a tinselaholic. She believed there was a right way to drape tinsel on a tree, one piece at a time, clump-free. And what about your tree? Does it belong in a Hallmark movie, or is it a little more…eclectic?