When a widow invites her busy grown children and their mates to a remote cabin without phone and Wi-Fi service, they must connect with each other and strange landlords to salvage Christmas.

SYNOPSIS:

Luna Sanchez-Danson (MOM; 55) rents a remote cabin in the woods for her family’s Christmas, but it’s very different from the classy-looking photos on the website. Her kids show up the first day to decorate, while their mates show up the next. Her oldest son, LAWRENCE (28), an attorney, fails to lodge a complaint due to a lack of phone and Internet service. SHARON (25), Mom’s daughter, laughs it off. The youngest son, BILLY (23), just wants to see that Mom has the best Christmas ever after Billy’s dad’s death less than a year ago. Tensions are raised by a shotgun-toting landlord, GRAMPS (75). He says he lives in the barn on the property and won’t let the family call out from his adjacent meadow with phone service.

Just before dinner, Gramps suddenly appears from the cabin’s bathroom with a towel around him. Luckily, his granddaughter, MAGGIE (23), arrives to take Gramps back to his retirement home in town. Mom, Lawrence, and Sharon are smitten with Maggie and invite the landlords to dinner. However, Gramps suffers a Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) episode and is forced to lie down in the one real bedroom, and Maggie must stay in the barn until Gramps can be transported in the morning. Maggie demonstrates her master’s thesis research on “spooning” with Lawrence as a therapeutic technique to calm people down, and Mom volunteers to spoon with Gramps.

Mom and her family are highly skeptical, but Mom has her best night’s sleep in months, and Gramps has his best sleep in years. Billy and his siblings are slowly convinced that neither Gramps nor Maggie is crazy. But the family’s dynamics become more chaotic and strained when Lawrence’s fiery Latina wife, NATALIA (28), and Sharon’s passionate Asian wife, DIANE WONG (25), arrive at the already crowded cabin. The family is comically lost without Wi-Fi and phone service. When Billy’s friend arrives in the form of Maggie’s Thesis Committee chair, PROFESSOR SHEILA JACKSON (40, black), Maggie and the others wrongly assume they are a couple. Any romance between Billy and Maggie looks impossible. Gramps becomes agitated into another TGA, compounding the dismal sleeping arrangements.

Everyone convinces Professor Jackson that spooning is an appropriate scientific avenue of study, and she departs. We learn that Gramps is faking the TGAs to keep from being taken back to his retirement home and to foster Maggie’s relationship with Billy. While the youngsters play a board game, Mom reveals she received a big payout from her late husband’s life insurance. She plans to rent the cabin forever and restore the lodge to its former glory. The couples all spoon themselves to sleep, including Maggie and Billy in the barn. Everyone’s Christmas dreams come true, proving that the greatest gifts in life come from actually being physically together without their electronics.

CHRISTMAS FOR RENT