Allison is a super mom. An architect at an important LA firm she's been raising her daughter alone, Lily, and the two of them take their mother-daughter outings seriously, things like when they go out once a week for dinner, or every year when they make a memory ornament for the Christmas tree, an ornament commemorating the most important thing to happen that year in their lives.
Lily has it pretty great. She has a wonderful best friend, she was crowned homecoming queen and she made the honor-roll, all in one year. Things would be perfect except for the fact that the Holidays always get her a little bumped out, missing the father she's never met, the father he mother won't even mention in front of her. Lily has no idea that the man is even alive.
He is alive of course. Charles Gustav Henry Alexander the III, the king of Baltania, and has no idea he has a daughter. He met Alisson when he was a student at an American University, nearly 17 years ago, but he lived under a false identity then, for security reasons, and he never even told Alisson he was a prince. Now, years later, he finally has an opportunity to return, under the pretense of attending an official meeting with an important partner. The thing he actually wants to do though is to reach out to Alisson one more time.
Neither of them knows that someone in the palace interfered back when they first broke up. They each think the other one initiated the breakup and Charles' letters never reached Allison's hands at all. At first, these misunderstandings keeping pilling up, getting in their way, but eventually, with a little help from their friends, the big knot untangles and they manage to find their way back to each other.
This movie has one big problem. It has a few smaller problems too, but the one big problem it has is the scene transitions. Every few minutes a cartoon of a book appears, the pages flip, and the camera zooms in on the next scene. It's quite annoying and the movie would definitely be better without it.
But I don't like to focus on the defects. I mean this is such a fun movie. And the king is so charming! I mean... this could easily have gone wrong. In real life, things often go wrong in similar situations. When they learned about each other, both the king and his daughter could have responded in an entirely different way. He could have been angry at Allison that she hadn't tried harder to reach him, he could have lost himself in regret that he lost the first years of his daughter's life. But he doesn't. He firmly believes he still has time to become acquainted with her. And he's right! Because when she's thirty-four years old it will be better to have seventeen years of memories with her father, after seventeen years without him than to have another couple of decades of absence, only this time charged with resentment for actually knowing the man.
He jumps right in, happy beyond belief to discover he has a daughter with the only woman he's ever loved, and when she asks him to go with her to a father-daughter ski trip at school, he's quick to say yes! He's such a glass-half-full kinda guy! I loved watching that!
Overall, this was an incredibly fun movie. It has its faults, but I'd watch it again some other Christmas, and I'd definitely recommend it (but only to someone whose taste in Christmas movies is as broad as mine) :)
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