Dear Thomas,

It’s no secret that the holiday season brings out the worst in consumer culture. The moment the clock strikes midnight on October 31st, stores quickly fill every nook and cranny with winter-themed tchotchkes in order to get a jumpstart on their competition. As Assistant Property Manager, it’s your job to bring that forced holiday cheer to the big screen.

Love The Coopers is but the first of many holiday films to be released in 2015. Using the same concept as most seasonal bangers in the past (Family Stone, New Years Eve, Valentine’s Day,) Love The Coopers employs a star-studded cast in order to put asses in seats and be the first to welcome you to the holiday season. 

And as we’ve learned from internet commenters, being first doesn’t justify anything. When the tinsel has settled, it’s glaringly apparent that Love The Coopers is just another PG-13 comedy about a zany family having to deal with one another during the holidays. There are contrived laughs to uphold its light-hearted conceit, and occasional bouts of emotions sprinkled on top to surprise us—until the family dog jumps on the table causing everyone to yell and be dysfunctional. It’s a stencilled formula that we’ve grown accustomed to dealing with for a month or two, just like the sad men in Santa outfits, busy malls, and rows and rows of packed shelves holding lame trinkets.

The type of trinkets that make one wonder, “do people actually buy these?”.

Apparently they do. You had the presumably unfortunate job of sourcing these trinkets to create a life-like scenario of what we experience at the end of every year. As we saw during our visit to the part-time job of Lauren Hesselberg—the awkward teenage crush for Ed Helms’ son; thousands of red, white and green streamers along with Santa dolls filling a shop aisle are an inescapable truth. No matter how lame and gaudy they are, they seem to show up every year—just like cheesy holiday movies. 

If red Starbuck cups have taught us anything, it’s that making changes to a time-honored tradition can create backlash, despite how trivial it may be. It’s almost become mechanical: every year, a handful of holiday movies appear and every year, Assistant Property Masters like you will run out to prop warehouses, crank open the giant doors and pull out a disheveled plastic Rudolph tangled in Christmas lights and feathered white boas. But that’s the nature of the job I suppose. 

Commercialization of the holidays has been around for many years, and it will no doubt continue for many more. And in a strange twist of fate, it means you will always have income around this time of year to spend on your family. And isn’t that what the holidays are all about?