If you want to get in the mood for Christmas -- or for home exchange -- or New Year's, or holding on to your Hanukkah joy consider renting "The Holiday" for your viewing pleasure. "The Holiday" is the best Hollywood feature ever made about home exchange because, well, because it's the only home exchange movie. So it is by definition the very best one.
It's a sweet story about two women who are newly single and depressed at Christmastime. They decide nothing will cheer them up like a change of scenery so they arrange to swap houses for two weeks.
I doubt anyone has ever agreed -- via a brief text message "chat" -- to a trans-continental home exchange starting the very next day. But the part that did ring true to this exchanger was the women's differing reactions to finding themselves in very different home environments.
The British exchanger runs around her temporary Hollywood mansion in the sort of ecstasy those of us with smaller homes often feel when entering our temporary digs and finding more space than we know what to do with.
Her Los Angeles counterpart is a bit too high-maintenance for some of the challenges she faces as a new home exchanger, such as difficulty getting to the door of the English cottage and finicky foreign home appliances. Luckily, the British home owner's brother, played by Jude Law, arrives to date her, which makes up for a lot.
I have read reviews of this film which say it's bizarre and unrealistic that these women would exchange homes with one another. To non-exchangers the movie must have seemed like more Hollywood glitz. Would someone with a million-dollar Hollywood mansion really let a stranger use it? Do Europeans hop on an airplane leaving their quaint old cottages for strange Americans to use? Well, yes. Call it a Christmas miracle, but home exchange happens. Maybe next Christmas we will wake up in each other's cozy cottage or magnificent mansion. Until then, dreams of sugar plums -- and a stronger US exchange rate to facilitate more foreign travel -- will be dancing in my head.
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