A Gingerbread Christmas

Having lost her mother fairly recently, a young woman named "Hazel Stanley" (Tiya Sircar) has relocated to New York with the hope of landing a good-paying job as an architect at an established firm. Unfortunately, those hopes are dashed when the job is offered to an Ivy League graduate instead of her. So, rather than staying in New York all by herself, Hazel decides to head back to Chicago to spend some time with her father "Ted" (Sugith Varughese) over the Christmas holiday season. When she gets there, however, she is shocked to find that her father hasn't done a good job in taking care of the bakery that her mother devoted her whole life to as the bills are piling up and, unless they can come up with some money very quickly, the bakery is likely to go out of business. Of equal concern is the fact that another bakery has opened up right across the street and it is owned by her former best friend "Shelby" (Kyana Teresa) who she hasn't spoken to in years. And even though her father's bakery has hired an outstanding baker by the name of "James Meadows" (Marc Bendavid), the customers are all lined up at Shelby's bakery instead. To that effect, in order to keep the bakery in operation, Hazel decides to enter a baking contest which offers a prize of $100,000 to whoever can build the best gingerbread house in Chicago. What she doesn't realize, however, is that Shelby and several other notable bakers have also entered this contest and they are equally determined to win this prize as well. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that was one of those films that had potential but failed to really deliver on it. I say this because it had a decent plot and an okay cast to help the film along, but it seemed like the director (Pat Kiely) was more interested in making a political statement than focusing on the task at hand. For example, I wasn't so much concerned with his apparent need to promote diversity and inclusion as I was about the fact that--for a romantic-comedy--it had very little romance and very little comedy. But then, I guess that doesn't matter. Be that as it may, while I don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, I was still somewhat disappointed with it overall and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

A Gingerbread Christmas (2022) -

The actor playing leading man James had very pretty eyes and also looked superb without his top on, so that was a reason to keep watching.

However, Tiya Sircar as the other lead, Hazel was a bit abrupt, just like her Mandalorian character from 'Star Wars: Rebels' (2014-8).

His character though, was quite sweet and charming to counteract her brassy ways and actually I thought that he deserved someone better and nicer.

Their relationship developed as they came up with and created a gingerbread house to win money in order to save her Dad's failing business and I have to say that after years of watching these made for TV specials, I have started to think that some of these down on their luck businesses probably should give up and close, especially if they had to rely on winning an obscenely outrageous amount of money from a scandalously popular local competition, which they clearly weren't actually capable of doing, to make it happen.

They made a big fuss about how to actually put the gingerbread build together. I've only done it once, but it really wasn't that hard to do and it certainly shouldn't have taken them a week to make what they did. It wasn't even that good really when compared to the other competition entries.

This wasn't the worst film that I've seen this season by a long shot, but it still had some weird moments in it.

• They've definitely gone out of the way to make it politically correct, with lesbians, Muslims and a variety of people of all colours (No disabled ones though!) and it was all a bit obvious that this was the case to tick boxes.

• The competition manager asked people if they wanted to say anything before they were judged, quite out of nowhere, purely so she could say something, because no one else did. Probably because it would be a weird thing to do at any competition.

• And I will never understand why, in order to show how popular these bakeries and other places were, they showed huge queues outside the shops, while, most of the time, the shops were half empty. I'm British so I know how to queue and you don't stand outside in the winter just for cake, you just make the people in front squash up so you can all fit inside.

• I also found James' change of heart at the end a bit quick and as I said before, I'm not sure I would have wanted to put up with her moods.

I watched it to the end, because he was cute, but I'm not sure that I was that enamoured with the film in general.

4.25/10.

Most Christmas movies are very predictable, a little corny, generally slow, and of course getting a bit politically correct but rarely offensive like this one to me. Someone had the idea to insert a Muslim character into a Christmas contest, and then many more people had to approve it! Then make her say she understands Christmas is about spreading love! Doubtful that a Muslim would associate in any way at a Christmas event exceeds the imagination as the reason the season is about love is from Christ and Christianity, whom Muslim oppose. So ridiculous it is offensive to both cultures! Worst concept for a movie I have ever seen. We turned it off.