What The Mistletoe?!?

I pick a new holiday inspired book to read each year around Christmas time to help get me in the mood for the holidays and this years pick was Billy Christmas.  The premise sounded awesome, a boy gets a tree that comes with 12 special ornaments, each ornament is associated with a task and if he completes all the tasks he will receive his greatest wish.  I love the idea of this, kind of a twelve days of Christmas with a twist idea.  Unfortunately the story did not live up to the premise.  The ornaments and the tasks were kind of a side bit to the bigger story of Billy Christmas and his family.  This would have been fine if that story made any kind of sense. SPOILER ALERT SPOILERS AHEAD.
Essentially the story is this.  Billy's father disappeared completely on his way to go get milk on Christmas almost exactly one year ago (minus the 12 days for the tasks of course)  Billy's mom has become withdrawn and depressed and Billy has to manage the household by himself.  Billy brings home a tree that comes with a bag of ornaments (ice skates, an axe, a replica of his bike, a pie, five golden rings, an iron bar, mistletoe, a sheet of music, four connected gold rings, a tiny lipstick, a dog, and a candle.)  After looking at the ornaments the tree comes to life and starts talking to Billy, telling him that every night between now and Christmas the tree will give him one of the ornaments and the task associated with it. OK so far so good, I'm liking the idea of this and I am ready for the tasks to start.  This is where it starts getting weird.  I'm not going into to much detail 'cause it still doesn't make a whole lot

of sense still. Billy is asked to do increasingly bizarre things, things that actually seem hurtful to some of his loved ones.  On occasion these odd requests help set up things for later, but most just seemed to be a test if Billy was willing to go as far as he was told.  Billy has a friend Katherine and an enemy turned friend Robert who get caught up in this insane quest.  The reward of all this of course is to get his father back and it is this thought that propels Billy to continue. The quest/tasks themselves don't follow their own rules, Billy was told to do certain things by a certain time and even when it did not get done, he just made it up later.  Some tasks were combined, some were used multiple times, it seemed he could do pretty much whatever and the events were going to proceed regardless.  By the end of the story we randomly learn that Katherine and Billy's father are some sort of magic tree people and Billy is half-human half tree thingy.  Katherine is supposed to be a very important tree thingy and was sent to our world to forget who she was for her own safety and Billy's father actually disappeared because he was protecting her, not that we found out exactly why she was/is important, who she needed protection from or where Billy's father had been.  Oh yeah and the kindly vicar turned out to be an evil knight 'cause um yeah. The ending was extremely abrupt and by the time the story ended I felt I had no idea what actually happened, who anybody was supposed to be or why any of this happened in the first place.

As you can probably guess this was not one of my favorite books.  I loved the original idea and want to steal the ornament quest idea and rewrite a book the way I want to read it.  The rest of this story was just to disjointed and unrealistic for me to enjoy in anyway.  I have no problem introducing fantastical elements into the story, but you have to make some sort of logical case for it, and this book just kept tossing ideas with no substance out there, kind of like the author had a couple different ideas for the story and just kept throwing things into the mix as he thought them up.  I do seem to be in the minority on this one though, the few reviews I have been able to find seem to like it a lot, words like lush and imaginative are used a lot.  I felt the book was slow and confusing and not very well thought out.  Don't let this stop you from reading it, I would like to hear what other people thought of it and maybe you all can find what I am missing.

Do you trust reviews when they are all five stars?  What is worse a great idea and bad execution, or a boring idea but great execution?  What is the weirdest holiday book you've ever read?