Do you have Christmas traditions that you postpone until later in the season simply because you want to savor the idea of the tradition just a little longer? I do. One of them is watching Serendipity—one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s set at Christmas time and it’s an epic love story—well, maybe not epic, but it’s epic in my mind. And I never get tired of watching it.I received an email from a dear friend last week asking me if I’d watched the movie yet this year. He knows that it’s part of my annual Christmas routine. I told him that I hadn’t watched it yet because I wanted to wait just a little bit longer. Well, I couldn’t take it any more and I watched it last night, and how can I not write another post about it?
The movie opens with a pair of gloves being grabbed simultaneously by a man named Jonathan (played by John Cusack) and a woman named Sara (played by Kate Beckinsale), who ultimately end up deciding to split up the gloves. Jonathan takes one and Sara takes the other. The gloves become a symbol of their relationship.
Gloves aren’t meant to function separately. Then can, if you are Michael Jackson, but they aren’t supposed to . . . and even he didn’t pull off it off very well.
Jonathan and Sara did not become a couple when they first met due to their circumstances, but they were never able to get past the feeling in their guts that things just weren’t right without the other person. Sara admits this to her best friend many years later when they fly back to New York to look for Jonathan:
I’ve just spent the entire flight starting at the sky thinking—not about my fiance, but about this mystery guy I met a million and a half hours ago—a guy I don’t even remember except for this vague picture I have inside my head. It was just a few seconds—a fragment really—and it was like, in that moment the whole universe existed just to bring us together.
At the end of the movie, Jonathan is lying down on the ice at Wollman Rink, inside Central Park—the place where he and Sara ice skated on the magical night they met, and with snow falling down all around him, he sees the matching glove tumble from the sky.
He knows she is close.
He reaches for the other glove—his glove—and sees that the one that just dropped from the sky is a perfect match. He sits up, cuts his eyes both ways, and then he turns around. And the two gloves that have been separated for far too long finally become a matching pair once again.
By the way, the little tidbit of information about Wollman Rink—I included it in a perpetual flip calendar I compiled for Barbour Publishing that is going to be released in February called 365 Inspiring Moments from the Great Outdoors. You can find that factoid on December 26 in the calendar.
