Kate’s Cape Breton Christmas
CHRISTMAS ISLAND – Directed by David Weaver – (limited spoilers)
Kate Gabriel
Halfway through a private charter flight from Los Angeles to Zurich, pilot Kate Gabriel (Rachel Skarsten) runs into bad weather and is forced to land in Canada. Her passengers, the Sharpe family, have a business meeting scheduled in Switzerland and are not pleased with this developnent. Instead of Zurich, they find themselves in a place called Christmas Island in rural Cape Breton on the twentieth of December.
Helen Sharpe (Kate Drummond), her husband Thomas (Jefferson Brown), and their two children Cali and Finn (Britt Loder and Lincoln MacNeill) are met at the airport by Postmaster Jim MacLeod (Peter MacNeill) and his son Oliver (Andrew W. Walker) who was also the air traffic controller Kate spoke to while landing. (Airport scenes were filmed at Stanfield Airport in Halifax.)
Helen Sharpe’s daughter Cali (Brit Loder)
With no hotel rooms available, Jim puts the Sharpes up at his place and Captain Gabriel becomes a guest of Christmas Island Mayor Maggie Hughes (Lauren Hammersley), who is also Oliver’s sister.
Asked about the town’s name, Jim explains that it “dates back to the Mi’kmaq nation. One of their elders was said to have been called ‘Noel’, And when he passed away, they named the town after him.” Though a storm is raging over the Atlantic, Cape Breton is enjoying unseasonably warm weather. Kate’s phone app indicates that the temperature is 39.2° F (4° C).
Oliver and Finn
Everyone can’t fit into Jim’s vehicle, so Kate rides into town in Oliver’s truck, which promptly breaks down. Despite Oliver’s resistance to Kate’s mechanical advice, she quickly figures out that the problem is a faulty alternator. Oliver is surprised, but not displeased.
According to Atlas of Wonders, the Mayor’s house, and Jim’s place are actually located in Peggy’s Cove, which is also where the lighthouse scenes were filmed. Downtown Christmas Island scenes were filmed on Montague Street in Lunenberg, and the place where Kate and Oliver have Santa flapjacks later is Lunenberg’s Knot Pub.
Lauren Hammersley as Mayor Maggie Hughes — Hammersley is Felix’s half-sister Adele in eight episodes of ORPHAN BLACK
Kate is anxious to please the Sharpes because she’s been stuck doing short charter runs and wants to travel the world, so she asks Helen how she can help with the situation, and is promptly put in charge of the children’s Christmas activities. This makes her uncomfortable because her father died one Christmas Eve.
She asks Oliver and his dad for help. Postmaster Jim gets the kids to help process the backlog of mail, explaining that every Christmas, parents send their kids’ letters to Santa with a pre-written response enclosed. “We send them back,” Jim says, “stamped with our postmark, and presto, the kids have a card or a letter from Christmas Island.” (This is mostly a true thing. The Christmas Island post office gets quite busy around the December holidays.)
Oliver masquerading as Belsnickel
Two other Nova Scotia Christmas traditions are described in the film. The lobster trap tree is a practice that began in Barrington, and has since been adopted by many other communities. Belsnickeling was brought to Eastern Canada centuries ago by German immigrants, and involves adult revelers dressing up as Belsnickel (a fur-wearing friend of Saint Nicholas). Then they visit their neighbours and challenge them to guess who they are.
Though Oliver is an Air Traffic Controller, he does not travel by aircraft, and Kate asks him about his “Fear of Flying”. “I don’t love the idea of not having any control,” he explains, “I went to university in Halifax, and my mom got sick in senior year, so I came back home to take care of her, and I needed a job, which is how I ended up at the airport.”
Oliver, Kate, and The Sharpes
The same storm that keeps the Sharpes out of Switzerland also prevents the delivery of out-of-town mail (some of it anyway). Cali makes herself useful and organizes a solution to that. Her mother Helen discovers an antique sewing machine and is inspired to resume her career as a fashion designer.
At the lobster trap tree lighting ceremony, a message saying that the weather has cleared interrupts Oliver and Kate as they are about to kiss. To reveal anything further would be much too spoilery.