The Christmas Cottage

This Christmas season is a busy one for San Francisco based Lacey Quinn. Beyond the holidays, she has to work as Quinn + Whistler, the design company she co-owns and operates with her boyfriend, Roger Whistler, who she's known since grad school, has to make some last-minute changes to its proposal for a major live/work housing development. If they sell the idea to the prospective clients, it would set their firm up for years and bring the brand Quinn + Whistler much-needed cachet. Workaholic Lacey doesn't mind working over the holidays, something that she has done before, this career drive the main attraction professionally and personally between Lacey and Roger, with the type of love found in fairy tales something in which she no longer believes. On top of the holidays and work, Lacey has to head back to her hometown of Wallowa Lake, Oregon to act as maid of honor for her best friend Ava Callaghan's Christmas Eve wedding to her fiance, Mason Cavalry. The generations-old Callaghan tradition is to get married on Christmas Eve and honeymoon at the nearby family cottage, which they call the Christmas Cottage. The Callaghan family belief, held by some like the family matriarch, Ava's widowed Aunt Sarah, is that spending a night together at the cottage at Christmastime will lead to eternal true love, which was the case for Aunt Sarah, for her parents, and hopefully for Ava and Mason. Lacey's trip will be a working one, those job responsibilities on top of the duties she has as maid of honor which include decorating the cottage for Ava and Mason's Christmas stay. This latter job may be more difficult for Lacey than she anticipates as Ava loves the brightness and color of Christmas, while Lacey's design style is urban chic, which generally means minimalistic in neutrals. Another point of possible conflict is the choice of Mason's best man, Ava's brother Ean Callaghan, who Lacey once dated. Their relationship ended on bad terms as their life goals were in different directions, seemingly leaving the other person as second priority: Lacey wanted stability, which meant having that secure job and a focus on career, while Ean, a chef, was fueled by wanderlust, traveling the world from job to job as what he calls a culinary explorer, which entails immersing himself in a culture to learn about its cuisine. Lacey and Ean's reunion is not only not as contentious and uncomfortable as they believed it would be, but rather focused on love, one that exists between Ava and Mason, and making the wedding what the bride and groom want. But as Lacey and Ean get stranded at the cottage overnight, the Christmas power of love of the cottage may have taken its hold on the pair. For a Lacey/Ean happily ever after, they both have to acknowledge that they still have feelings for each other while what Lacey feels for Roger is not love but respect, and let go of those long-held self wants to have the other person as their priority. That potential happily ever after is complicated by Roger's earlier than anticipated arrival in Wallowa Lake for the wedding.