chocolate-box

(modifier) informal sentimentally pretty or appealing

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

choc′olate-box`

adj.

excessively decorative and sentimental, like the pictures on some boxes of chocolate candy.

[1900–05]

Translations

chocolate-box

[ˈtʃɒklɪtˌbɒks] ADJ [look, picture] → de postal de Navidad

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

Mentioned in

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References in periodicals archive

How much: Offers around PS210,000 What's the deal: This house has a cutesy, chocolate-box feel from the front with pretty ivy trailing up the exterior walls.Once a weaver's cottage and workshop, built in 1840, it has charm by the bucketload.

FORFAR, ANGUS

It chimes with Eye's vision of a retirement spent swanning around some rural idyll, roses scattered around the door of a chocolate-box cottage.

Eye dreamt of sports cars as a child

The action takes place in the Balkans around 1885 and so the show has sumptuous period costumes and a chocolate-box set designed by Mark Bailey.

TAKE FIVE; Director Emma Lucia convinces us to buy tickets to Clwyd Theatr Cymru's latest production of Arms And The Man

Despite the potentially chocolate-box Derbyshire setting, Steve Edge and Matt King (Peep Show's legendary Super Hans), who play uncles Fergie and Loz, do an excellent job of keeping the Starlings real enough so they don't sink into the comedy quicksand of cosiness.

WE LOVE COMEDY DRAMA

THE Old rectory Cottage is a gorgeous chocolate-box thatched home in the quiet village of Tarrant Keyneston in Dorset.

Cooking up a treat on a Valentine's getaway; Inside guide

A tiny medieval town just a few miles inland from the glorious Dorset coast, Beaminster may look typically English on the outside, but underneath its chocolate-box exterior beats a chic French heart.

France in the heart of Dorset

"It's definitely not a tragic ending, but it's not chocolate-box happy either.

Amanda quits role

They live in a chocolate-box thatched cottage in Devon.

Blast From The Past David Copperfield

Tourists to Midland beauty spots were urged yesterday to look beyond their "chocolate-box" image and see the problems of poverty and deprivation beneath the surface.

Postcards to Prescott call for better rural deal

Serafima Ryangina's dizzying Higher and Higher, in which a radiant pair of male and female workers climbs toward total electrification, had been criticized in 1934 for applying a "Michelangelesque power" to the "sickly sweetness of an old chocolate-box picture." In the 1950s, its ferociously bland joyousness was canonized.

Socialist Realist Painting