In a Holidaze

The Wish and What Follows

Maelyn Jones makes a wish to the universe on Christmas Eve in Utah — something in the vicinity of I just want to be truly happy — and the next morning she wakes up on the plane to Utah, back at the beginning of the holiday week. The same week plays again. The same family gathering at the same mountain retreat, the same faces, the same events unfolding in the same sequence, and Mae living through them again knowing what she couldn’t have known the first time.

This is the premise of In a Holidaze, Christina Lauren’s holiday novel, and it is deployed with more intelligence than the Groundhog Day parallel might suggest. The question the time loop is asking Mae is not simply who do you love but what do you actually want — and the novel takes that question seriously enough to let Mae be genuinely confused about the answer for most of the book.

The confusion is specific. Mae has been coming to this Utah mountain cabin for her entire life with two families who have been intertwined since before she was born. She knows everyone here; she loves everyone here; she has grown up in this particular version of warmth and belonging. The emotional complexity arrives from the fact that she doesn’t quite know how her feelings for the people around her translate into a life she could actually live.

The Setting

The cabin in the Utah mountains is the novel’s most vivid achievement. Christina Lauren (the pen name for the writing team of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) has a gift for specific physical setting, and In a Holidaze uses it fully. The cabin is described with the particular warmth of a place that has been beloved over many years — the worn wood, the specific smell, the way the snow looks from particular windows, the geography of a communal life that multiple families have shared and shaped.

The holiday rituals that structure the week — the particular meals, the activities, the games that have become traditions through repetition — give the time-loop premise a natural material to work with. Mae loops through a week of specific traditions, and the specificity makes the loop both funny (when she can predict what’s coming) and melancholy (when she understands that she’s watching something that can’t last forever in this form).

The winter landscape is rendered with the kind of sensory precision that makes setting feel inhabited rather than described: the cold, the quality of light on snow, the specific pleasures of warmth sought and found in cold conditions. The Utah mountains earn their place in the novel rather than serving as merely an attractive backdrop.

The Emotional Logic

The love interest — Andrew, the son of the other family — is established early as someone Mae has not allowed herself to think about romantically. He has always been present; that presence has made him invisible in a specific way. The time loop becomes an opportunity for Mae to actually see him, to notice what she has managed not to notice through years of proximity.

This is a psychologically credible version of the slow-burn romance premise. The barrier between Mae and her feelings isn’t invented by the plot — it is the natural consequence of the social context that makes certain feelings too complicated to acknowledge. The loop strips away the performance of not-noticing and forces a different quality of attention.

What the novel does well with this is to insist that Mae’s emotional clarity must be earned, not just delivered. Each iteration of the week reveals something she missed or misread in previous iterations. The process of accumulating understanding through repetition is the emotional structure of the book, and it gives the romance a developmental arc that straight-line narratives sometimes struggle to achieve.

Christina Lauren’s Craft

The writing partnership of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings has produced a large number of contemporary romances with a consistent set of qualities: fast-paced plotting, witty banter, strong emotional grounding, and a tendency to take their protagonists’ internal lives seriously even when the external plot is lightweight. In a Holidaze demonstrates these qualities well. The pace is efficient without feeling rushed; the comedy is consistently sharp; the emotional moments land without sentimentality.

The ensemble cast — Mae’s family, Andrew’s family, the various siblings and cousins who populate the cabin — is managed with the skill that a two-author team brings to character logistics. Everyone feels distinctly themselves without the novel having to stop and characterize them individually; the personalities emerge through their interactions in a way that feels natural rather than schematic.

Holiday Fiction’s Requirements

The best holiday fiction has a dual requirement: it must deliver the specific pleasures of the season (warmth, togetherness, tradition, beauty) while saying something true about human experience that gives those pleasures more than decorative weight. In a Holidaze meets this requirement by taking its protagonist’s emotional confusion seriously. Mae’s uncertainty about what she wants — despite being surrounded by evidence of what she has — is a real psychological state, and the novel treats it as such.

The resolution is satisfying in the way that holiday romance resolutions should be: unambiguous, warm, earned through the journey that preceded it. The final section moves quickly, but the emotional groundwork laid in the preceding iterations means the speed doesn’t feel dishonest.

The Case for Seasonal Reading

There is an argument to be made that certain books exist most fully in their proper season — that reading In a Holidaze in December, when the cultural atmosphere already carries the weight of the holidays it’s evoking, produces a different effect than reading it in July. This is not a criticism of the novel’s internal qualities but an observation about how setting resonates differently in different contexts.

The Utah mountains, the cabin warmth, the specific pleasures of family tradition: all of these land more fully when the reader is already in the orbit of that kind of experience. In a Holidaze is the kind of book that would benefit from being read in exactly the circumstances it depicts.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A warm, well-constructed holiday romance with a time-loop premise that earns its emotional resolution. The setting is vivid, the protagonist’s journey is genuine, and the whole thing is pleasurable company for a winter afternoon.