Thomas Kinkade's A Christmas Cottage

This movie was actually available in full online but when I checked to upload it, they'd taken it off. Well...I absolutely loved it (and not just cos of the Sam Winchester element!) and couldn't understand how they could be offering it for free.

If you get a chance, watch it. I have to warn you, though. It's full of the warm, fuzzy element, beautiful setting, inspirational speeches, the works. It's also very gentle. Sweet. If you like that sort of thing.

I do.



It's about Thomas Kinkade, the painter. He takes a job to paint a Christmas mural in his little hometown, a job he looks down on, because he's all Berkeley and this is so beneath him. It's sweet. It's twee. It's frigging sentimental. He's experimenting with "expressionistic" art.

But as he reminds himself, $500 is $500. Especially when you're about to lose the family home.

Then he discusses it with his mentor Glen Wesman.

Glen: Did you ever do a painting you didn't believe in?

Thomas: It's kind of funny you ask. Actually I just took on a job. Doing this ridiculous Chrimas mural of Placerville for $500.

Glen: Ridiculous?

Thomas: Yeah, I know.

Glen: A mural of Placerville? It's your chance to illuminate where you live; to inspire your neighbours. Do you think because they're not sophisticated, they don't deserve your best art? That mural can recall the people you love for posterity. It could change the way they see themselves. Art crosses all borders, surpasses all languages. It's a place where we are one family. And if you are willing, really to see with your eyes and your heart, one image can change lives. You can introduce men to their souls. You can bring that to this town. You have that power. Give your very best always. It's the only way an artist knows.

And in the final scene, Glen who has emerged from a deep depression and painted his last masterpiece tells Thomas: "It's the light, Tom. That's what lasts. The leaves are transient. They grow, turn green, turn red, then die. But behind them the light lasts forever. Paint the light.

"I had been trying to paint my sorrow. To show the bleakness of the world without Nicole. But then you came with a candle last night and I knew what Nicole's memorial should be. Not darkness but light. Sometimes, we can barely see beyond the forest to the sky. I was painting the leaves of the forest and never saw the light of the sky behind it. Now I see it. That's all I need to see now."

In the early scenes, Glen describes the masterpiece that he didn't know he would end up painting. He was recounting a picnic in Paris with his wife Nicole when they were both young. Nicole had since died and left him in a halfway house between remembrance and forgetting, life and death, evening and night.

"We were in Paris before the war. We would picnic along the Seine. A little wine, some bread by the water; she liked the simple things. I lay back on the grass and looked up. The light played through the trees and touched her. You must see the summer light in Paris. It surrounds the leaves, holds them somehow. If there were a God, that light would be like His hands holding the world together."