It's the Christmas season, the time for Seattle lawyer Emily Mitchell to bring out her holiday checklist of five things to accomplish in her quest for her family to have the perfect Christmas. The checklist is a tradition since she was eight years old when she and her mother were about to have what was to be a disastrous Christmas, it which turned around on a miracle to become one of her most memorable, the checklist which accomplished such. She strives for those Christmases to be exactly like on the Harmony Home Network's Sugarplum, her favorite series of feel good Christmas movies. She knows that Sugarplum is not real life in that everything that happens is "perfection", and she knows that she and her family will have to work hard to reach that unattainable standard of perfection in each of her husband Ben Mitchell and their two teenage offspring Nina and Max Mitchell being preoccupied in facing challenges in their lives. At the end of a bad day, Emily makes a wish upon a vintage star tree topper for a magical Sugarplum Christmas. Who appears in the flesh is the character of Sugarplum, who everyone can see but whose identity only Emily knows. Sugarplum, with her book of rules to achieve Christmas movie perfection, believes she was sent to help Emily achieve the five items on her checklist to reach Christmas perfection before Sugarplum heads home to movie land. They will both discover if that is indeed the case and if Sugarplum's rules are transferable to the real world.
—Huggo