A Disenchanted Utah Christmas: Finding Magic In The Real World

“I’m supposed to be traveling to Park City for a mega Christmas convention for my work, but I got stuck in a little place called Cedar Heights”, said the extremely attractive, stubbled mouth of a hardworking man who had lost his wife and had an adorable child who still believes in Christmas even though his loss had made him wonder about magic anymore. He hangs up the phone only to find a beautiful, porcelain-faced young woman smiling sympathetically at him.

"Why don’t you spend Christmas at my family inn?" she asked as she pours him a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice to go with the homemade breakfast she is serving him at the Black Bear Diner.

Suspicious and intrigued, he takes up the offer and decides to follow her in his tough but new sparkly white Toyota Tacoma. They pull up to a yard mostly decorated, though it looks like they lost steam about halfway to the front porch.

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They enter a lobby full of decorations that don’t match and look like they have been purchased over the span of twenty years, one piece at a time. Homemade decor looks like trash that blew to the walls and stuck.

Welcome to a Utah-style Christmas at the Hiatt Christmas Inn, and while they try to do their best, they don’t have a professional designer, are a bit sentimental and, frankly, don’t have the budget to put on the show every year. He smiles and says, "This is Christmas," as he stumbles over a box of garland that never made it up onto a shelf.

This real Hallmark movie is for those of us who have to live in the real world sometimes and may feel overwhelmed by the perfect décor so casually thrown around in the last Christmas movie you watched.

So, if you don’t feel quite like you got it all together this year, we close with the new couple arm in arm as his cute daughter runs up, syrup in her hair and needing a diaper change, to say, "Christmas brought us together."