In a Holidaze

I picked up In a Holidaze because a friend pressed it on me mid December with hot chocolate in hand and said this one actually made her cry at an airport. I was skeptical. Christmas romances tend to blur for me after a while. Same snow, same kiss under lights, same family dinner that goes wrong and then right. Christina Lauren published this one with Gallery Books in 2020, a 336 page holiday romance, and I figured it would be sweet and forgettable. It was sweet. It was not forgettable, mostly because of the strange trick at its center and because Maelyn Jones felt like someone I have actually met.

Maelyn is twenty something and stuck in that soft place after college where you have a job but not a direction. She works, she pays rent, she loves her family with a tired loyalty that anyone with loud siblings will recognize. Every Christmas her family piles into a cabin in Utah with another family they have vacationed with for years, the Hollises. The two families cook together, drink too much wine, play games, ski badly, and crowd around the tree. Maelyn has spent years secretly loving Andrew Hollis, one of the Hollis sons, from a careful distance. He is kind to her. He teases her. He treats her like a sister in public and something warmer in small private moments that she replays too often. She has never told him plainly.

The setup lands fast. The Christmas trip starts with the usual noise. Parents catching up. Brothers raiding the fridge. Couples pairing off. Maelyn arrives carrying her secret and a newer worry about work and about whether she is drifting through her own life. There is a man she has been half dating back home, a job that feels thin, a sense that everyone else got a map she missed. Then the holiday ends with a small disaster, the kind of Christmas night mishap that feels bigger because everyone is tired, and Maelyn makes a quiet wish on the drive home. She wishes for another chance at the holiday. For the nerve to say what she means. Then she wakes up and it is the start of the trip again.

The cabin and the crowd

The cabin matters more than the plot summary lets on. It is not a sleek lodge from a movie. It reads as lived in, with bunk beds and thin walls and a kitchen that can barely hold two cooks. Boots pile by the door. Someone always loses a glove. The parents run the schedule with the confidence of people who have done this for a decade. The brothers, on both sides, bring noise and appetite and old jokes. Maelyn slots into her role without thinking. She helps chop. She pours. She laughs at stories she has heard six times. She keeps the peace.

That is the first thing the book gets right. Family Christmas has assigned seats even when nobody says so. Maelyn is the easy one, the helper, the girl who will give up the better bed and pretend she prefers the couch. Andrew is one of the golden boys of the group, liked by the dads and teased by the moms, comfortable in his skin in a way Maelyn envies. Around them are partners and siblings and parents who all love each other and still drive each other crazy. The scenes in the kitchen and on the ski lift and around the game table carry the whole first third. You can smell the butter and pine.

I liked how ordinary the affection feels. Nobody gives speeches about family. They just show up with extra blankets. The dads argue about the grill. The moms trade looks when someone drinks too much eggnog. The younger brothers steal fries. It is warm without being perfect, which makes Maelyn stand out a little. She loves this week. She also dreads it, because being surrounded by love makes her own stuck feeling louder. Everyone asks what is next for her. She smiles and changes the subject. Andrew watches her a beat too long when she does it, and she pretends not to notice.

The trip follows its familiar shape. Arrival hugs. Grocery chaos. A big dinner. A day on the slopes. A night of games and drinking. A Christmas Eve exchange with handmade touches. A late night walk in the cold. Lauren keeps the beats loose and social. Conversations overlap. People interrupt. That looseness is doing quiet work. When the loop starts, you need to know the normal order so the repeats feel off.

Waking up stuck

The loop arrives without explanation and without ceremony. Maelyn leaves the cabin at the end of the holiday with a sick feeling that she wasted her chance. She wished she could do it over. Then her alarm goes off and she is back at the beginning of the same week. Same drive. Same hellos. Same joke from her brother about her packing. Then the details repeat too closely. The same spilled drink. The same toast. The same argument about board game rules.

Lauren does not give her a guide or a rulebook. There is no wise stranger explaining the magic. Maelyn simply has to live it. Each time she reaches the end of the holiday, something goes wrong enough that she feels the week failed, and she wakes back at the start. The trigger seems tied to her own sense of wrongness rather than a fixed date. That vagueness annoyed me a little, and I will come back to it, but it also keeps the focus where the book wants it. This is not science fiction. It is a romance using a strange device to force a shy person to practice honesty.

The early repeats are funny and a little painful. Maelyn tries to play it cool and fails. She drinks too much one night and says too much. Another time she says too little and watches Andrew drift toward someone else. She tries avoiding him. She tries chasing him. She tries being bold with the other guy back home in her thoughts, telling herself maybe Andrew is only a habit. None of it holds. The cabin keeps resetting. Her parents keep asking the same questions. The snow keeps falling on the same driveway. The repetition lets Lauren show how much of Maelyn is performance. When you have heard the toast four times, you stop laughing on cue and start hearing what people actually mean.

I appreciated that Maelyn does not turn into a mastermind. She is bad at using the loop. She forgets what she changed. She mixes up versions of conversations. She hurts feelings she meant to spare. One repeat she tries to fix everything at once and makes a bigger mess at dinner. Another repeat she withdraws and spends the day skiing alone, which only makes her lonelier. The book lets her be clumsy. That clumsiness makes her easy to root for, because most of us would be terrible at reliving our family Christmas with full memory while pretending everything is normal.

Andrew Hollis up close

Andrew earns his place as the love interest without turning into a fantasy. He is steady. He works hard. He shows up for his parents and his brothers. He remembers small things Maelyn mentions and follows up later, which is the kind of attention that ruins a person for anyone else. In group scenes he is funny in a low key way, the guy who defuses a tense joke with a better joke. Alone with Maelyn he is softer. He asks about her job. He asks what she wants for next year. He listens like he actually wants the answer.

The secret between them has history. They grew up circling each other. A look held too long on a ski lift. A late night talk on the porch that both pretended was nothing. A time he almost said something and did not. Maelyn has filed these moments away as proof and also as warning. Proof that he might feel the same. Warning that she might be reading too much into kindness. Anyone who has nursed a long crush inside a friend group will feel sick with recognition. You cannot ask directly without risking the whole easy balance. So you joke instead. You date other people halfheartedly. You tell yourself the timing is wrong.

Lauren writes their chemistry through proximity rather than grand scenes. Shoulders touching on a crowded couch. Hands brushing while washing dishes. A shared blanket on a cold walk. A look across the table when someone asks Andrew about his dating life. The tension lives in the small choices, in who sits next to whom and who volunteers for the same chore. I found that more convincing than big declarations. Desire in a house full of family has to be quiet. They steal minutes. They speak in code. The loop gives Maelyn more of those minutes, and she starts noticing how often Andrew seeks her out when she stops performing availability for other people.

There is a rival shape in some repeats, or at least the fear of one. Other guests pair off. Someone flirts with Andrew. Maelyn watches and hates herself for watching. The book does not turn this into a mean competition. The other women are not villains. They are just people on vacation. That restraint helps. The obstacle is never another person. The obstacle is Maelyn deciding whether to risk the friendship and the family ease that comes with it. Andrew, to his credit, does not play games. When Maelyn is direct, he meets her there. When she hides, he gives her room.

Trying to fix Christmas

The middle of the book becomes a series of experiments. Maelyn decides the loop must be about fixing something, so she tries to fix everything she can see. She smooths a fight between her parents. She helps one of her brothers with a sore subject. She encourages one of Andrew brothers with work or school pressure. She tries to be the perfect guest, the perfect daughter, the perfect friend. She cooks more. She cleans without being asked. She says yes to every plan. For a repeat or two, the holiday runs smoother on the surface. Then it still ends wrong, and she wakes up back at the start with flour on her sweater and a headache.

That stretch says a lot about her. Maelyn thinks love is earned by being useful. If she can make Christmas perfect for everyone else, maybe she will deserve the thing she wants. It is a familiar trap, especially for oldest daughters and peacemakers, and Lauren writes it without scolding her. The scenes where Maelyn overfunctions are both funny and sad. She refills chips nobody asked for. She mediates a game night dispute like a diplomat. She stays up late wrapping gifts for people who already feel loved. Meanwhile Andrew keeps asking if she is okay, and she keeps saying she is fine with a bright voice that fools nobody.

Slowly the lesson turns. The repeats stop rewarding perfection and start rewarding truth. When Maelyn tells her mom she feels lost at work, the air clears a little. When she tells her brother she is tired of being the easy one, he actually hears her. When she stops laughing at a joke that bothers her, the room adjusts. These are small honesties, not speeches, and they change the texture of the week more than any perfect dinner did. The book suggests the loop is not about saving Christmas. It is about Maelyn learning to take up space inside a holiday that has always loved her but never quite seen her restlessness.

What she wants beyond Andrew

One of the better choices here is that Andrew is not the whole answer. Maelyn has a life outside the cabin that needs attention. Her job back home pays but drains her. Her apartment feels temporary. Her relationship with the guy she was seeing has the stale taste of convenience. She likes him well enough. He is not unkind. But being around Andrew strips away her excuses. She compares every quiet moment with her boyfriend to every charged minute with Andrew and feels disloyal and awake at once. The loop forces her to stop stalling. She cannot keep both the safe story and the true one.

Her work arc stays light but real. Maelyn is good at her job in the way helpful people are good at jobs that use them up. She takes extra tasks. She avoids asking for more. She tells herself stability is enough. Over the repeats she starts admitting she wants different work, work with more contact and more making, though the book keeps the details broad rather than mapping a whole career change. That broadness works for the romance. This is not a career novel. It is a Christmas novel about a woman who has been editing herself at work and at home. The job talk functions as a signal. When she speaks up there, she can speak up about Andrew too.

Her family arc carries equal weight. Maelyn loves her parents deeply and still feels unseen by them in the way adult children often do. They praise her for being easy, which starts to sound like praise for being quiet. Over several Christmases she practices saying harder things. She tells her dad she needs advice, not jokes. She tells her mom she wants to be asked about more than logistics. Those conversations do not fix everything. Parents do not transform in a week, even a repeated one. But the air shifts. Being loved and being known start to feel like separate things, and Maelyn decides she wants both. That decision powers the romance more than any single kiss.

The last loop and the gripes

The final repeats tighten. Maelyn stops trying to game the week and starts living it as if it counts, because it does. She tells the truth earlier. She risks embarrassment. She lets a dinner go imperfect rather than stage managing it. She chooses Andrew not with a grand speech but with clear words at a moment when it would be easier to stay silent. Lauren stages the confession in a way that feels earned, private enough to be brave and public enough to matter to the families who share their lives. The loop breaks not with a flash but with a sense of morning after a good sleep. Christmas ends. Nobody resets. Maelyn cries on the drive in a different way this time.

Readers who need hard magic rules will fidget. The book never explains why Maelyn loops, why only she remembers, or what exactly ends it. Is it the wish. Is it honesty. Is it choosing Andrew. The text leans toward emotional logic. When she stops betraying herself, the week lets her leave. I wished for one cleaner line about the mechanism, even a throwaway theory from Maelyn that the book confirmed. Without it, some repeats feel chosen for effect rather than cause. I also thought the insta pull between Maelyn and Andrew can read too fated in early chapters, all loaded looks and history, before the slower work of talking fills it in. If you dislike destiny talk in romance, the opening may test you.

The side characters stay thin by design, and that is both a feature and a cost. With so many parents and brothers and partners in one cabin, nobody outside the central pair gets a full arc. One brother is mostly jokes. One parent is mostly warmth. Andrew brothers blur for stretches. I did not mind much because the crowd functions as weather, but readers who love big ensemble payoffs may want more. A late reveal about another couple lands quickly and resolves quickly. It feels like a sketch of a subplot rather than a thread. The book wants to stay with Maelyn and Andrew, and it pays for that focus with a few flat edges around them.

Still, I closed it with that specific Christmas book glow, the one where you want to text your siblings and forgive the burnt rolls. The Utah snow feels real. The family noise feels real. Maelyn awkward hope feels real most of all. Lauren trusts the reader to understand why a woman would need to live the same week several times before saying a simple true sentence out loud. Anyone who has ever rehearsed a confession in a car and then walked inside and said never mind will understand completely. The magic is soft. The feelings are not. I would hand this to a friend who likes holiday romance with more heart than spice, and I would tell her to stick past the fuzzy rules until the last Christmas lands.

Who should pick this up

If you read for banter and family chaos with a romantic core, this fits. The chapters move fast. Readers who want open door heat should adjust expectations. This is kisses in the snow, not a scorcher. Readers who want a mystery solved will also need to relax. The loop is a frame, not a puzzle.

I think it plays best in December, ideally when your own family group chat is already arguing about who brings pie. The cabin scenes hit harder when your house smells like cinnamon. But the core question travels well outside the season. What would you say if you got the week back and nobody would remember your stumble except you. Maelyn uses her do overs to stop pleasing and start asking. That is a good use of magic, fuzzy rules and all. I finished it on a plane like my friend did, not crying exactly, but smiling at the window in a way that made the stranger next to me smile back.