Christmas Jars

Twenty-two year old Hope Jensen is not having a very good approach to this Christmas season. While she wants to be a journalist, she, working as the assistant to Lyle Butler, the editor to the online publication Metro Buzz Columbus, is treated by him, in his self-absorbed demanding manner, solely as a gopher, she not even in his sights as a future reporter. The third in the trifecta of her problems in that her apartment is broken into with many of her things stolen. But the worst of the issues arguably is the passing of her adoptive mother Louise Jensen, her only living relation, from a debilitating bout of cancer. Single Louise found Hope as a newborn abandoned at Chuck's, the family diner where she worked as a waitress, the diner which they always and which Hope still views as her second home. But amid her grief, the one happy spot is the mysterious jar of money left at her doorstep in the aftermath of the break and enter, it only marked "Christmas Jar". She discovers from online searches that she is only one of a handful of people that has received such jars in Columbus over the past decade, all the recipients who were in need at the time. At Lyle's pitch meeting for Christmas stories where the regular stable of reporters don't come up with anything to his liking, he allows Hope to submit a pitch, her idea to investigate the Christmas Jars, which he approves, she having two weeks to investigate and write the story. The goal of her story is to let the givers know how much the jars have meant to their recipients. While she believes many have paid it forward by giving jars themselves, she also believes that there was only one giver in the early years, the initiator of the idea. She believes that she's found that/those initiator(s), someone within the Maxwell family, who own/operate their own furniture restoration business. Rather than speak to the Maxwells in a direct manner, she decides instead to pose as customer, and in the process slyly try to find out their connection to the jars. She does discover that they are indeed the people who started the jar giving, and seem to want to remain anonymous. Hope is torn in writing the story to Lyle's satisfaction to progress her journalistic career and in the process coming clean to the Maxwells about who she really is, against the Maxwells seeming want not to be known in connection to the jars, especially as she befriends the entire family, but specifically mutually falls for twenty-four year old Ian Maxwell.