The Spirit of Christmas

When we first started our Christmas gentle watching adventure, we set ourselves some standards, as all civilized people do. We did not want to watch any movies that included the following:

1. Ghosts or really any supernatural elements 
2. When there is a mysterious stranger and he turns out to be Santa (this is hard to avoid)
3. Family movies - romance has to be central, I really don't care that much about kids or dogs
 

This is the Netflix page for this movie: "As Christmas approaches, attorney Kate Jordan
travels to Vermont to oversee the sale of an inn, where she falls for a handsome but cursed ghost"

So as you can see from the aforementioned guidelines, The Spirit of Christmas was a risk, and it was a movie we'd avoided for a pretty long time. But here's the catch when watching so many gentle watches, but don't have actual cable television - you start to run out of options on Netflix. So there we were, settling in for 90 minutes of The Spirit of Christmas, and you know what? It wasn't awful. Confusing, kind of awkward, sure, but maybe kind of okay. We certainly talked about it for a long time afterwards, though part of this was due to the fact that the premise and the conclusion really made no sense whatsoever.

Summary: Kate is a high powered lawyer who is sent to the wilds of Vermont to facilitate the appraisal of an old inn before her firm can get it sold. Problem is, each appraiser has been scared off by the ghost that haunts the place. The ghost, Daniel, turns out to be the former owner of the inn who comes back for 21 days (the 21 days leading up to Christmas Eve) every year. Shockingly, they fall in love and maybe he becomes real? Or maybe they only see each other three weeks a year? It's unclear.

My face for a good portion of this film, and quite awhile afterwards

So, in the first five minutes, we get to see that Daniel was murdered. We don't see who did it, but he gets knocked in the head with a rock. He's also wearing circa-1910s clothing, as interpreted by a modern day costume designer, and basically just looks like a hipster old-timey.

Jumping ahead about 90 years, we find Daniel still wearing these clothes and not able to remember anything from the moments leading up to his murder. To give the movie some credit, it makes the right choice by making Daniel a corporeal being, so there's no walking through walls or weird vanishings into air. There also aren't any jokes about him not understanding modern day technology. He clearly has learned quite a bit in the three weeks he shows up each year, though how he has done this is unclear since he never interacts with anyone during these visits. Overall, the science of this ghost situation is pretty confusing.

Tell me you haven't seen this guy making craft cocktails at your local hipster bar

Daniel refuses to stop haunting his old haunt (ba dum bum), and Kate decides that, if she helps him figure out how he died, he'll be free to move on to wherever ghosts move on to. So of course there's a party, and it turns out Daniel DOES know a lot about cocktails because he used to be a rum runner in 1919. Transporting alcohol illegally does not mean he would know how to make craft cocktails (not exactly what was being ran during Prohibition), and thus begins the confusion of the timeline of Daniel's life.

He's been practicing making drinks during the three weeks he's in corporeal form

I'm going to pause here to let you all know that both Clara and I have undergrad history degrees, she is now a fashion historian, and I have been teaching U.S. History for the last eight years. We know a fair amount about American history, but despite that, both of us can deal with a certain amount of historical inaccuracies. It's par for the course with movies and particularly with gentle watches. But this timeline makes no sense. The Volstead Act went into effect in late October, 1919 and went into full effect on January 1st, 1920. But somehow Daniel gets all caught up in rum running in the two months between those two events? Bootlegging didn't become active until it was necessary and certainly someone who was so reticent about it, like Daniel says he was, wouldn't have gotten involved so early on. I realize that this is minor to the overall plot, but when it turns out that he gets murdered because of this involvement, it adds a little weight to the matter. Okay, history lesson over.

The Spirit of Christmas falls solidly into a classic gentle watch trope of the woman who works too much and needs to learn that there are more important things besides her job. And she does learn that lesson, as she and Daniel get to know one another by looking at old pictures, decorating a Christmas tree, talking while their faces are very close to one another, and finally dancing at what used to be the annual ball thrown at the inn during Daniel's actual life.

If you don't fall in love at the annual dance, did you even fall in love?

Let's rate this ghost, shall we?

The Cheese Rating: Very low. This movie takes itself pretty seriously; it's solidly in the drama category rather than the rom-com category. One reason is that it was on Lifetime rather than Hallmark, so really, this movie is pretty tame for that platform. My Stepson is My Cyber-Husband this is not.







The Wine Rating: This gets three wine glasses (though full disclosure, we watched this movie at 10 am while eating croissants). Part of the reason we're giving it three glasses is that the bar was SO low. We thought this movie was going to be total trash, and it was not total trash. The leads were fine and had some chemistry, nothing particularly special, but it definitely got points for sky-rocketing above our expectations.

Hot men: Daniel, or Thomas Beaudoin if you're feeling formal, looks better the more he looks like he is in the present. You decide:

Not terrible: 

I love a man in glasses, but these round, wire-spectacles are a tough sell

But isn't this better?