Home Sweet Christmas | 2024 Christmas Movies

Home Sweet Christmas is the second Candace Cameron Bure movie on Great American Family this year. I honestly didn’t realize this movie was on the schedule. When I referenced a second Cameron Bure movie this year, I was talking about Let It Snow, a Hallmark movie from 2013 that GAF somehow got their hands on. I’m not going to watch that one. But I will watch Home Sweet Christmas.

Sophie (Cameron Bure) is an acquisitions and mergers lawyer living in the big city. When her great uncle passes away, he leaves her a majority stake in Marlow Maple Meadows, a sugar maple farm. With only a few days before Christmas and a big merger, she must go back to the small town to decide what to do with the farm. Reliving her childhood memories with her old friend, Sam (Cameron Mathison), Sophie realizes that maybe she’s not ready to sell the farm after all.

Ugh. This is yet another boring movie. Her job is boring, his job is more boring, even the big montage of them fixing up the house is boring. I thought that maybe we would get a little intrigue when they realize that great uncle Henry had a mystery love when he was younger but, no, they left it for too late it the movie so that mystery is solved almost immediately. Home Sweet Christmas is another movie that doesn’t really have a point. They put two people together, tell us they are in love (or will fall in love), and that is it. There has to be more to a movie than just falling in love. But at least this movie had a dog?

Rating: Sell the whole thing and go away

Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story | 2024 Christmas Movies

I swear that Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story was marketed as a Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce movie. It’s not. Maybe I misunderstood because Donna Kelce is in it and it’s, obviously, very about the Kansas City Chiefs. I feel bamboozled.

Alana (Hunter King) and her family are big fans of the Kansas City Chiefs football team. They even own a shop that sells Chiefs merchandise. This year, they are finalists for the Fan of the Year award. Derrick (Tyler Hynes) is a member of the fan engagement team for the Chiefs. He gets assigned to meet the family to judge whether they should win the coveted title.

Sadly, I got very bored during this movie. King and Hynes never really seemed to connect with each other. Ed Begley Jr. as Alana’s grandfather felt very old, which made me sad. (As a side note, Richard Riehle plays Alana’s other grandfather. He is approximately the same age as Begley Jr. but doesn’t feel anywhere near as ancient.) They kept dropping Donna Kelce in to say random unnecessary lines. There just wasn’t anything fun or interesting here. I suppose maybe if you are a Chiefs fan since they showed Andy Reid and some retired players. But I’m not sure that was enough to save this.

Rating: Tackled at the 5 yard line

Believe In Christmas | 2024 Christmas Movies

It is quite possible that with Believe In , Hallmark has given us a Christmas romance movie with an entirely new plot. There are no business owners losing their shops or people trying to decorate/refurbish a house…there isn’t even an evil businessman trying to buy all of the shops on Main Street so he can build a giant mall. This may be something…gasp…new.

Beatrice (Meghan Ory) and Emilia (Lindura) are best friends. Beatrice dislikes Christmas and loves black coffee whereas Em adores Christmas and loves all things sweet. When Em wins two tickets to Christmasland in a contest, of course she has to bring her best friend with her. Who else would she spend Christmas with?

Yes, the plot of this is pretty basic. What the plot description leaves out is that Christmasland is a place where the townspeople become Christmas movie trope characters to give the tourists a “Christmas movie experience.” For example, the woman in the bakery who wins the Christmas baking contest every year gets beaten by the newbie in town and huffs about it a little bit…that is all fake. And that is what makes Believe In Christmas so interesting. We (and Bea) don’t know what is real and what is fake. There is a question around every turn and I think that is what makes this movie so great. Every time we, the audience, groan about something being cheesy, is it because it is cheesy or are the townspeople playing it cheesy because that is how it would be in the movie. I love it.

I only have one complaint about this movie: Em gets paired up with Porter (Kevin Hanchard), who looks like he is old enough to be her father. I don’t think we ever get actual ages for the characters but Hanchard is 50 years old and I can’t find any information about how old Lindura is. I can say that he looks like he’s in his 40s and she looks like she’s in her 20s. It may be great skin but it also may be super creepy. Thankfully, this is the one low point to a movie I otherwise enjoyed thoroughly.

Rating: I want to go to Christmasland and play pretend.

A Cinderella Christmas Ball | 2024 Christmas Movies

It feels like a lot of Danica McKellar’s Christmas movies involve either a prince or dancing. Well, A Cinderella Christmas Ball has both! Though I’m not sure why they titled the movie that way. This has nothing to do with the Cinderella story at all. (After some research, it was originally titled A Royal Christmas Ball and they changed it.)

Chelsea (McKellar) owns a dance studio in Chicago. When she finds a photo that may be of her birth mother, who was also a dancer, in Havenshire, her students fly her out so she can find out more. Once in Havenshire, she gets hired to teach Phillip (Oliver Rice), the prince, how to dance a very specific variation of the waltz. However, he is very unwilling to learn. That is a lot on her plate for her short four day trip.

I think Great American Family’s theme for this year’s movies is “A couple steps below Hallmark.” The plot for A Cinderella Christmas Ball is stupid. Chelsea’s mother died in an accident when she was five years old yet she doesn’t know who her mother is. I don’t remember her ever saying that her mother gave her up for adoption before that so her mother’s identity would be information that is available to her. This movie would have been a whole lot better if she was like “I want to emotionally connect with my mother more” and just made the whole visit to Havenshire a sight-seeing vacation to maybe visit the same places her mother did. Instead, this is all about Chelsea getting information about her birth parents.

In the end, it’s fine to watch. I think the Hallmark and Lifetime movies are way more interesting than anything GAF has put out so far this year but I’m also not really their target audience.

Rating: Can I look away like Chelsea does when she’s dancing with Phillip?

BeBe Winans' We Three Kings | 2024 Christmas Movies

In past years, the Lifetime Christmas movie offerings have been awful. Somehow they have really been coming around this season. BeBe Winans' We Three Kings is another hit for the channel. I am definitely surprised.

Three years after their mother’s death, the three King sisters - Lydia (Lisa Berry), Gracie (Faith Wright), and Abigail (Bethany Brown) - have lost their connection with each other. After their father, musical legend Lincoln King (BeBe Winans), gets into a car accident on an icy road, the sisters are forced back together to deal with their grief and heal their family wounds.

This was such a touching movie. I’m overlooking the minor flaws in the script because everything else was so good. I loved the way the sisters argued, the way sisters do, and were able to look back and apologize properly for the terrible things they said. If I needed to say something bad about the movie, honestly, it would be that it wasn’t long enough. I would have liked them to spend a little more time healing the sisterly bond instead of it simply being an apology with helping out at the store. But nothing was really lost without seeing that. It just felt short, that’s all.

Rating: I would like a sequel but I’m not sure how they would do it

Deck The Walls | 2024 Christmas Movies

Next up is Hallmark’s Deck The Walls, a movie about house flippers that is so laden with product placement it made me audibly groan. It may be a little cheesy when movies make up fake companies as vendors for the characters but it is so much better than real company logos and stores being front and center.

Rose (Ashley Greene) is an interior designer that gets tasked to help her brother, Sal (Danny Pellegrino), with a charity house flip in her hometown. Contractor Brysen (Wes Brown) is also on the job. Can Brysen get “Runaway Rosie” to stop running away from her problems and face them?

For the most part, Deck The Walls is a fine movie. The acting is fine, the plot is fine, the script is fine. What is not fine is the amount of time that Home Goods takes up. (Also Nutella but that has far less screen time than Home Goods.) This movie really should have been called Deck The Walls With Home Goods. I get that movies sometimes need product placement to help with the budget. But here is how much Home Goods is in this movie:

1. Rose does a web search for “stores in solon.” (Solon being where the movie takes place.) The first result is a giant Home Goods logo. The second result is mostly covered up by Rose’s hand.

2. Rose goes into Home Goods to look around for inspiration and has a rather long conversation with associate Oliver about how she’s going to look around for inspiration and how many aisles full of stuff they have.

3. After the gang gets more money for their project, Rose goes back to Home Goods to buy more stuff. We see her walking out of the store carrying at least five Home Goods bags with the logo in full view and the giant logo on the store itself behind her.

The Nutella place is bad but not as bad. Aunt Gigi (Carolyn Hennesy) says she’s going to make Christmas cookies with Nutella. Then they cut to everyone in the kitchen smearing Nutella on cookies as the camera pans past an open jar of Nutella. ‘Tis the season to be advertising.

There are a few other instances where the characters name products but I’m not sure how much product placement it really is since they are talking about products from the late 90s-early 2000s. (Pogs, Tamagotchi...things like that.) So, yeah, the movie is watchable if you can get past all of the product placement. There are even a few cute moments between characters. I just wish they didn’t try to market stuff to us so hard.

Rating: GO AWAY HOME GOODS!

Our Little Secret | 2024 Christmas Movies

Our Little Secret is the third movie from Lindsay Lohan’s partnership with Netflix. Her Christmas movies have been doing a little bit better than her non-Christmas movies so I guess we have some hope here.

Avery (Lohan) and Logan (Ian Harding) have known each other forever. They were childhood friends who eventually became a couple. But when Avery took a job in England, Logan freaked out a little bit and proposed to her at her surprise going away party. Avery declined and broke up with him. Ten years later, Avery is going to spend Christmas at her boyfriend, Cameron’s (Jon Rudnitsky), family home. Little does she know that Logan is dating Cam’s sister, Cassie (Katie Baker), and will also be spending Christmas at their family home. Avery and Logan decide not to tell anyone that they know each other. How long can that be kept secret though?

On the plus side, Our Little Secret is a pretty decent movie. The plot is kinda terrible but, otherwise, I found the movie fairly enjoyable. Kristin Chenoweth is awesome as the evil Erica, mother to Cam, Cassie, and Callum. Lohan and Harding have this nice chemistry where you can see that they don’t really hate each other but they don’t want to like each other either. That can be difficult to pull off.

However, on the negative side, I don’t understand why they felt the need to keep their previous relationship secret. Even if they didn’t want to say that they dated, they could have said they were childhood friends. I can’t believe that anyone in that family would have been upset to find out that people they are dating know each other. The whole plot of the movie should have been about them trying to get Erica to accept them. Sure, part of the plot was trying to get Erica to accept Avery but there’s no reason that couldn’t have been the main plot. There are plenty of movies about trying to impress the in-laws and comedically failing. Here, the big secret feels unnecessary.

Thankfully, the terrible plot doesn’t keep the movie from being watchable. There is still enough to enjoy that you can kinda overlook the big secret. Oh, and the dog should have totally been named Cookie.

Rating: Celebrate good time. Come on!

A '90s Christmas | 2024 Christmas Movies

When I saw the title for A ‘90s Christmas, I thought that this might be a movie starring actors or musicians from the 1990s. It’s not. It’s a time travel movie. As someone who lived through the ‘90s, that made me a little sad.

Divorce lawyer Lucy (Eva Bourne) just got a promotion to partner. As she celebrates alone in a diner on Christmas Eve, she is asked by the waitress, Grace (Katherine Barrell), if she is happy with her life. While Lucy claims to be happy, Grace - now a rideshare driver - transports her back to her childhood home in 1999. Now Lucy has the chance to repair all of her broken relationships.

As I said, I was sad that this movie wasn’t really about the 1990s. They had the stupid references: “Ugh, how we wait so long for the internet to load?”, “I can give you a Blackberry to read your email.”, and people staring at her when she says to google something. (For reference, Google existed in 1999. It just wasn’t considered THE search engine.) Oh, and there was one song - I think it was “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None The Richer, which came out in 1998. That is about all of the ‘90s stuff the movie has. I hate it.

Sadly, there isn’t anything that could save this movie from the disappointment the title gave me. The acting was fine but nothing spectacular. The script…well, the most annoying thing about it is Grace tells Lucy multiple times that she can’t change the past. To the point that “The 12 Days Of Christmas” plays every time she does something that causes the future to change. And the change is the freaking point of the whole movie. So Lucy is trying to figure out how to get back to present day without changing anything and Grace is doing nothing to help her. WHAT IS THE POINT OF GRACE?! There are so many contradicting things going on. I hate it.

Rating: This is not a ‘90s Christmas.

Debbie Macomber's Joyful Mrs. Miracle | 2024 Christmas Movies

Back in 2021, I watched my first Mrs. Miracle Christmas movie. That was the third movie in the series, which didn’t matter much because it was a new actress (Caroline Rhea) playing the Mrs. Miracle character. This year’s Joyful Mrs. Miracle has Rachel Boston in the role. I love that this is a character that can easily switch actresses with no real consequence to her.

After the passing of their grandmother, siblings Charlotte (Pascal Lamothe-Kipnes), Benedict (Matthew James Dowden), and Henry (Max Lloyd-Jones) reunite to decide who will take over as CEO of the family company. Annie Merkle (Boston), an estate planner, arrives to help the family realize what is really important to them and to help Charlotte reconnect with her first love, Austin (Tanner Novlan).

I loved this version of Mrs. Miracle. To me, Caroline Rhea made the character a bit more goofy. The Rachel Boston version is still a little silly but in a that-person-is-too-happy kind of way. There is a scene where a couple gets engaged and Annie tries her best to contain her excitement before she yells “Oh! I’m a hugger!” and hugs the newly engaged woman so tightly. I honestly hope that Hallmark keeps Boston as Mrs. Miracle for any future movies. She really was the brightest spot of the movie for me.

Don’t get me wrong…the rest of the actors are great in their roles. Even Charlotte’s son, Cody (Logan Carriere), was decent. As a matter of fact, there is a possibility that Joyful Mrs. Miracle will be my favorite movie of the year. Other movies will have to work very hard to beat it.

Rating: I would like Mrs. Miracle to come hang out with me

Christmas Under The Lights | 2024 Christmas Movies

Alas, we are still in the Bad Movie Era. Hallmark Mystery’s Christmas Under The Lights has some cute animals but that is about it.

After her mother passes away, Emily (Heather Hemmens) returns to the family’s animal rescue ranch to help her brother, Nick (Antonio Cayonne), and his friend, Luke (Marco Grazzini), plan the annual Christmas Carnival.

This movie was so boring. I know that a lot of the movie is Emily’s journey through her grief and childhood trauma and it’s awful to say that her journey is boring. But this is a movie. There needs to be something interesting to keep me from looking down at my phone. And, to be honest, I lost interest so often that I had a difficult time telling Nick and Luke apart. I really hope that a better movie shows up soon.

Rating: At least the alpacas were cute?