Can you hear that? The not-too-far-off ominous sounds of jingle bells and holiday commercials? The smell of old wool sweaters and peppermint mocha syrup? Can you feel its inexorable merry approach? What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? That’s right, it’s Hallmark Christmas Movie Season!
Note: As far as I know all of these were completed before the WGA/SAG strike began.
Last year had some great highs (the Hanukkah movie about competing delis with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the movie that was a sneaky sequel to a Candace Cameron Bure movie from a few years back where Stephanie from Full House comes into town and falls in love with the guy who ended up with CCB in the first movie) and some definite lows (acting so stiff it makes a nutcracker look expressive, that one terrible movie all about colorblindness), but overall it was an improvement on previous years. Let’s do a rundown of this year’s offerings to the greeting card gods:
In October, we kick off the first weekend with Checkin’ It Twice, ****about “a journeyman hockey player” and “a real estate agent in a career crisis” who presumably fall in love; Where Are You, Christmas?, where a woman wishes for a year WITHOUT Christmas, gasp; and Under the Christmas Sky, which will likely be full of painful sky/space-related puns since it’s about an astrophysicist.
After that, we’ve got Christmas By Design (fashion designer holiday romance), Mystic Christmas (Mystic Pizza holiday romance, I am not kidding), Joyeux Noel (American in France holiday romance, someone’s been watching Emily in Paris), and Flipping for Christmas (house flipper holiday romance).
Then we get to the worst title for a Hallmark Christmas movie that I have ever seen, it kind of makes me want to throw up. On November 4th, I will be seeing Never Been Chris’d, and I think I will never be the same.
Moving on after that, there is The Santa Summit (it’s SantaCon, but Hallmark’d), Everything Christmas (about a year-round Christmas town), Christmas Island (a pilot gets diverted on her flight, hopefully she doesn’t run into Matthew Fox), A Heidelberg Holiday (Christmas in Germany!), Navigating Christmas (Christmas in a lighthouse on a remote island!), A Merry Scottish Christmas (Christmas in Scotland!), and Holiday Hotline (Christmas in a cooking hotline call center!).
Hallmark likes to stuff Thanksgiving week with seven movies between Thursday and Sunday: Catch Me If You Claus (almost as bad as Chris’d), Letters to Santa (whose plot sounds like Parent Trap but with possible magical intervention), Holiday Road (about a road trip, not a street that loves to decorate), Christmas in Notting Hill (basically Notting Hill but he’s a famous soccer football player and she’s American and doesn’t know who he is), Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up (a sequel to last year’s horror film about HOA overreach), Our Christmas Mural (someone paints a mural at Christmas, but I bet for dramatic purposes it won’t be easy!), and A Biltmore Christmas (featuring lots of product placement for the Biltmore Estate).
Then we finally get to December, actual Christmas month: My Norwegian Holiday (I am excited to see some reindeer), A Not So Royal Christmas (about a tabloid journalist and the palace groundskeeper posing as the royal she needs to interview, sounds ripe for hijinks), Christmas With a Kiss (should’ve leaned into that Kardashian spelling for some alliterative fun), Magic in Mistletoe (grumpy reclusive author is an important Hallmark movie archetype), Christmas on Cherry Lane (this is one of those multi-storyline ones that usually don’t work because the runtime is too short for that many plots), Round and Round (this year’s Hanukkah movie is also a time loop movie, I am so in), The Secret Gift of Christmas (a personal shopper working with a widowed single father, such a classic Hallmark setup), and Sealed With a List (something about New Year’s Resolutions, sure fine). We finish with Friends & Family Christmas. This is such a lazy title, but who cares because it’s a lesbian Christmas romance! Last year saw the first Hallmark Channel Christmas movie with two men as the central couple, and this year we have a new first. They’ve had lesbian couples as a side pairing or as one of a handful of couples in a multi-storyline movie, but never like this before as far as I know. I rejoice, as Candace Cameron Bure froths at the mouth.
Let the games begin!