Follows Hazel, who goes to spend the holidays in her home town, where a romance begins to bloom with a local contractor who has been helping her father with their family bakery, but some misunderstandings threaten to tear them apart.

Carl's life is stalled. He has worked at the same job at a Montréal video game design company for five years with his bosses not yet having decided who will get the next promotion. He and Sue, his wife of several years, are also facing problems in their marriage, including sexually. To reinvigorate their marriage, he has arranged a weekend ski getaway for them at Ste. Adele in the Laurentians, staying at Auberge au Coeur Sauvage, a small bed and breakfast ski lodge. He has a grand gesture planned, he choosing this specific locale as it has special romantic memories for him, however those memories are with another woman. When they arrive, Carl finds that the person with who he has been emailing regarding the reservation and the current owner is Robyn, who he introduces to Sue as a former coworker - which is true - but who he eventually divulges is an ex. Carl has never told Sue about Robyn, the woman with who he has special memories at this locale and who he may consider, deep in his heart, as the love of his life, the one that got away. What happens in Carl and Sue's relationship this weekend is not only affected by Robyn, but by others at the lodge: Anatolli, a Québecois actor with some fame in France, and his mother, Lise, who have a codependent but dysfunctional relationship themselves; Stacey and her unusual husband Doug, she Carl's coworker and friend who he called in a panic for advice; and someone in Robyn's not so past.

A romance novelist with writer's block and a celebrity chef suffering from a bad review accidentally end up staying at the same French villa for the summer. As they attempt to share the house and mend their personal lives, they find that what they're really missing is more of a personal matter.

A fractured family is forced to confront what tore them apart at the eldest son's wedding.

Working on the fourth in her successful anthology-romance series featuring "in love" characters Desmond Ranes and Catarina, Izzi Simmons is told by her best friend and editor Mila that the ending of her first draft, already past due, is unacceptable. Mila's take on the problem is that Izzi has made Desmond an unrealistic version of a romantic character in being "perfect", which matches Izzi's own unrealistic pursuit of a man. With Mila unwilling to push the final deadline past Christmas Eve--less than a week away--as Izzi requests, Izzi is able to convince her to let her work on the necessary edits from the Antler Lodge in Silver Springs. Since her parents moved to Florida, Izzi, a winter-wonderland traditionalist in her view of the perfect Christmas, has found the Lodge her Christmas home away from home, especially as its proprietor Bob is as much a traditionalist as she is. The only reason Mila allows this working vacation is that Bob informed Izzi that he's retiring and selling the lodge so it may not be the same retreat next year. When she arrives, she learns that he sold it to his son Matt, a widower of three years, who wanted to moves himself and his adolescent daughter Kacey back to Silver Springs for family reasons after moving a large hotel in Seattle. What immediately strikes Izzi about Matt is that he is the exact image of the paintings of Desmond used for her book covers, and she discovers that nobody associated with the publishing company knows who was originally commissioned for that job. Her thoughts that Matt might be her Desmond quickly dissolve as he displays human flaws, even in basic maintenance--he wants to transform the lodge into what she sees as against her Christmas sensibility. As Matt and Izzi spend more time together, and Matt himself discovers the issue of the book-cover likeness and knowing the reason behind it, Izzi starts to see in Matt the true nature of what Desmond should be, while Matt begins to wonder if meeting Izzi in this manner is a sign that he is ready to start another romance. to begin a romantic life again. What might affect this is the arrival of Matt's childhood friend Jennifer, who has long been in love with him herself.

Julia returns to her hometown for Christmas to drown her sorrows after her recent political campaign for city council ended in a landslide loss.