2023 Holiday Romance Movie Roundup: Part 1
It’s that time of year again!
Okay, guys. It’s December. Hallmark has been airing new holiday movies since *checks notes* mid-October. This year’s crop includes a lot of actors from beloved ’80s and ’90s TV shows, some fancy houses, and lots of city girls falling for small-town mechanics. I’ve got some Hallmark, some Lifetime, and at least one Netflix movie sitting in the queue, I hope to review as many holiday romance movies as my schedule allows.
In an effort to get these recaps up while you’re still in the mood to watch these movies, I decided to divide this up into a few parts, so here’s the crop of the first four, all of these Hallmark:
Checkin’ It Twice
Where Are You, Christmas?
Christmas by Design
A Merry Scottish Christmas
So here we go:
Title: Checkin’ It Twice
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: None
Premise: The title is a hockey pun. “Checkin’,” geddit?
Plotty Stuff: We open on a blonde with a professional bob, Ashley (Kim Matula), walking through an airport in a small town. She gets a call from her douchey boyfriend to tell her that a) he’s poached one of her real estate clients, and b) sorry, babe, but he can’t spend the whole week with her family after all. She dumps him. She crosses paths with a guy who looks like a young Kurt Russell, Scott (Kevin McGarry), who is on the phone with his girlfriend, who dumps him. Ashley’s here in Idaho to see family. Scott’s here to play hockey for a minor league team called the Trouts (not how that word is pluralized), full of dudes with names like Pierre who are missing teeth. Scott has daddy issues because his father was a big deal NHL player, but now he’s “old” (he’s like 35) and is worried his chance to play for an NHL team is running out. Ashley and Scott discover that their credit cards got mixed up when they bought things at the airport (which I don’t really get, because who stops to buy stuff when they are leaving the airport) so this is the plot contrivance that will force them to meet again. Ashley’s family drags her to Scott’s hockey game that night, because apparently hockey is a big deal in Idaho. She tracks him down after the game and they straighten out their credit card situation, but then it turns out Scott lives in Ashley’s parents’ guest cottage, which is a thing you’d think her parents would have mentioned? On the other hand, Ashley puts off mentioning to her parents that her douchey boyfriend isn’t coming because she dumped him. Anyway, a series of random events, all of them hockey-related, put Ashley and Scott in each other’s personal space repeatedly, and they flirt. Scott talks about his daddy issues and his rapidly advancing age. Ashley admits that she feels like she has to stay in New York even though she’s unhappy there (of course) because her parents sacrificed a lot to pay for her college and first apartment. Ashley’s… cousin? friend? it’s never specified… is a real estate agent, too, and she mentions that the biggest agent in Idaho Falls is retiring so there’s about to be a lot more business, and wouldn’t it be great if they worked together? (Obviously it would be. Why bother hedging, Ashley?) Meanwhile, because Scott is basically Methuselah, his coach is like, “Hey, old man, you could be a coach,” but Scott isn’t ready to give up on his NHL dreams yet. On the other hand, there’s a blonde with a professional bob it might be fun sticking around for, but then she gets a call from New York that is basically “big opportunity for you if you can get here in two days,” and then Scott gets called up to the majors. I am not new here, so I know how this is gonna go, but for the sake of this recap: Will Ashley go to New York?! Will Scott give up on his dream in order to coach in Small Town Falls?! Will Ashley and Scott share a chaste kiss at the end of the movie?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: There’s a Christmas tea thing where the hockey players serve tea to the ladies of town. Scott serves tea to Ashley’s niece’s huge teddy bear, which is his save-the-cat moment. He also gets roped into decorating for Christmas repeatedly, even though he says at the beginning of the movie that he’s not that into Christmas. (He’s in a Hallmark movie, though. HE’LL LEARN.)
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: Nada. The town is called Idaho Falls. Because the hockey team is the Trouts (I can’t) there’s a running bit with fish tree ornaments.
Hallmarkian Career Paths: Ashley’s a New York City real estate agent.
Other Hallmark Cliches: The whole plot, basically.
Notable Coats: Not so much coats as hideous scarves. (Ashley’s grandmother makes them.)
Does It Snow? Alas, no.
Other Thoughts: I’ve never been to Idaho, but while I know it is adjacent to Canada, it is not actually Canada, right? Why not set this movie in Vancouver or something? Between the hockey fandom and the accents, it sure feels Canadian. Also, Scott talks about getting pulled up “to Boise,” which, as far as I know, does not have an NHL team. (No one in the history of cinema has ever been as happy as Scott is about going to Boise in the scene where he gets The Call.)
Should you track it down on streaming? Sure. It’s perfectly cromulent. Formulaic, but the lead actors turn in good performances and it might be fun if you’re a hockey fan.
***
Title: Where Are You, Christmas?
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Jim O’Heir, Lyndsy Fonseca
Premise: Pleasantville but with Christmas instead of sex
Plotty Stuff: Addy (Fonseca) is a PR professional in Chicago. She has hot plans to go to the Maldives at Christmas, but her brother calls her and tells her to come home because he’s planning to propose to his girlfriend and wants the whole family there. She decides to postpone her trip and go home even though she finds Christmas stuff tedious. She arrives, and her mom immediately sends her out to run a bunch of errands. After she buys poinsettias, etc., she gets in her car, and it won’t start. She goes to the auto repair shop, where an extremely sad beardy fellow named Hunter (Michael Rady) is in charge. They make eyes at each other, but Hunter’s chief character trait seems to be mopey. He hasn’t even decorated for Christmas! The next morning, she’s driving her car (which is at the shop, isn’t it?) and has car trouble again, and then the car hits some ice, spins out, and crashes. She hits her head. When she comes to, everything is grayscale. Hunter finds her and pulls her out of her car and gives her a ride home. When they get back to her house, all the Christmas decorations are gone. She goes inside and asks about that, but her dad is like, “What’s Christmas?” Addy spends the next several scenes discovering that everyone in this town is bitchy and mean now that there’s no color, and they have no idea what Christmas is. Addy finds a ring that turns out to be Hunter’s grandfather’s, which he gave to Hunter as a Christmas gift, which makes Hunter remember Christmas, which causes him to change into full color. Addy recruits a very reluctant Hunter to help her get everyone else to remember. Hunter admits that he has PTSD from his time in the army, which I think we’re meant to interpret as the reason he’s sad all the time. Anyway, Addy and Hunter team up and they colorize a few people, but Addy remains black and white, and it’s heavily implied that it’s because she doesn’t have the true spirit of Christmas because she’s so busy she doesn’t stop to appreciate the people around her. There’s an underbaked conflict between Addy and her father that essentially shakes out to his being upset that she moved away and doesn’t call home enough. Pretty much everyone changes to color, but Addie is the Tobey Maguire of this movie and stays black and white. So will Addy remain black and white forever? Is her phone possessed by evil Santa (more on that below)? Did this movie really mean to imply that the Magic of Christmas can heal PTSD? Addy’s dad is played by Jim O’Heir (Parks and Rec’s Jerry Gergich.)
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: They go into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree and then decorate it with junk from the auto shop. The climax of the movie takes place at a Christmas “pageant” that seems to be more of an open mic night where whoever wants to gets up on stage and gives a speech that wraps up various plot threads.
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: Red Lake Falls, which is pretty much a Christmas theme park until it goes black and white. (Although, honestly, it sounds like a horror movie setting.)
Hallmarkian Career Paths: Addy does publicity for a possibly evil corporation in a city. Hunter is a mechanic, which is the sort of manly career Hallmark likes to bestow on its heroes.
Other Hallmark Cliches: Since Christmas doesn’t exist in the black and white world, they marathon New Year’s movies instead. Addy’s mom says, “Every year, they make a million new New Year’s movies and they start airing in June!” *chef’s kiss* (There are actually a lot of meta jokes in this movie, which I appreciate.)
Notable Coats: Addy wears a gorgeous cranberry-colored coat in the first scene that we never see again. She wears a cute black and white checked coat in the car accident scene that we also never see again. She wears at least four different coats in this movie, actually (it’s sort of hard to tell when she’s grayscale). This really begs the question of how she fit so many coats in her luggage, but she seems to have driven from Chicago to somewhere in Minnesota? Jerry Gergich and Addy’s brother are Vikings fans, so that’s a clue. So maybe she just keeps a ton of coats in her car?
Does It Snow? No, dammit. Was snow not in the budget?
Other Thoughts: The mechanism that causes the Christmas amnesia is a weird animated Santa on Addy’s phone, to whom she wishes there was no Christmas shortly before she gets in the car accident. Phones plague her the rest of the movie, which is a nice touch; mostly they malfunction in her hand, but also she can’t make phone calls to people outside of Red Lake Falls. The animated Santa possesses her phone for most of the movie, so, you know. Probably evil. Of course the device that helps Addy do her evil corporate job is kind of evil itself.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yes. Even though it deals with Hunter’s PTSD a little flippantly, overall it’s a cute movie with an unusual premise, and it’s self-aware enough to poke fun at various Hallmark cliches.
***
Title: Christmas by Design
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Nada
Premise: A fashion designer gets a Hallmark romance.
Plotty Stuff: Well, hold onto your Santa hats, this is one of those Hallmark movies they tried to fit five movies’ worth of stuff into. We open on fashion designer Charlotte (Rebecca Dalton) asleep in the apartment/atelier above her NYC fashion boutique. I can already tell this is going to be a Not How Any of This Works sort of film, but let’s roll with it. She’s woken up by her sassy Latina assistant Margo (Adriana Vasquez) (who it is revealed later is also Jewish?). Charlotte’s mom calls and is like, “You should come home because this is the last year we’re doing the Elf Capades,” but even though Margo points out that “80% of our sales come from the website,” Charlotte is like “I must stay in NYC in case we have a customer!” (Does Charlotte not have employees?) Then a pipe bursts in Charlotte’s building and most of her merchandise gets wet, but this is less of a concern than the fact that she has nowhere to live for a week while the pipe is repaired. (Charlotte and Margo are shown using blow dryers on the merchandise in one scene. I’m sad for all the ruined fabric.) Then Charlotte gets a call from a department store design competition to say she’s got 8 days to design family-friendly Christmas outfits. (Every Project Runway contestant ever is like, “Eight days? Loads of time!”) So, since she can’t stay in her apartment, she drives home, and on her way into town, she rear ends a vintage Chevy pickup truck, which turns out to be driven by a mechanic named Spencer (Jonathan Keltz). He promises to fix her car (the front bumper falls off, which seems bad) and gives her a ride home. When she gets there, her family is immediately like, “Let’s go do Christmas things!” And she’s like, “I can’t, I have to sketch,” but they force her. (There’s also tension between Charlotte and her stepfather, so file that way for later.) The family also mentions an Evan, who must be her evil ex. They go to a diner, which is hosting part of the Elf Capades, a festival Charlotte’s late father invented, where Charlotte learns that Spencer is this town’s most eligible bachelor. Spencer invites Charlotte to attend the Capades with him because he needs a buffer from all the young women in town who repeatedly throw themselves at him. In return, Charlotte asks him to model for her. So agreed, we get some scenes of Charlotte and Spencer doing holiday things together. We learn Spencer is a widower and that Evil Evan is now the mayor of this town. Charlotte struggles with her design, so Spencer suggests she design pajamas, and she agrees this is “Genius!” (IS IT?) We’re then treated to a montage of Charlotte making ugly pajamas and Spencer trying them on. Charlotte then learns Evil Evan is the one who cut funding and is ending the Elf Capades. (Evan says something about other things in town needing more resources, and I suspect that he’s being fiscally responsible, but we can’t have that if it means torpedoing a holiday festival that doesn’t generate revenue or bring in tourists. None of this matters because we never hear from Evan again and the fate of the Capades remains ambiguous at the end of the movie.) Anyway, Spencer and Charlotte start falling for each other, but then Spencer overhears Charlotte on the phone to Margo and we get a Big Misunderstanding. When Charlotte goes to the auto shop after Spencer stands her up to be like, “What the hell, dude?” they fight and he knocks over a cup of coffee onto the final pajamas for the competition (which are hideous, so it’s just as well). Then Charlotte goes home and is a total pill to her family. Charlotte later has a heart-to-heart with her sister and this clears up the whole family crisis, including her resentment of her stepfather somehow, but the pajamas are still ruined because I guess coffee doesn’t come out in the wash. She recruits her whole family into being her little sweatshop to make new pajamas overnight and she has learned an Important Lesson about family at the holidays. So, will Charlotte finish her new pajamas in time and win the design competition? Will the bespoke pajamas Charlotte makes for Spencer win his heart?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: They walk through a market. They play darts in a bar. They play Christmas Pictionary with Charlotte’s family. They play Christmas bingo. Spencer finds Charlotte’s late father’s old tow truck and fixes it up for her.
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: I never catch the name of this small town in Connecticut, but Elf Capades is doing a lot. (Charlotte at one point says that this town is a four hour drive from New York City, which, fact check: false, unless traffic is really bad. It takes four hours to drive from New York to Boston, just saying.)
Hallmarkian Career Paths: We’ve got our second mechanic of the season!
Other Hallmark Cliches: Oh, we’ll get there. See “Other Thoughts” below.
Notable Coats: Eh, the coats are unremarkable. Charlotte wears a fuzzy Muppet-skin sweater for a long stretch of the movie that I’d make fun of more if I didn’t own a very similar sweater.
Does It Snow? It does!
Other Thoughts: When Charlotte and Spencer get in the tow truck for the first time, he says, “Thank God for these old ’90s radios. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” I don’t know what you’re talking about, Spencer, the ’90s were five minutes ago. (I’m so old, sigh.)
Anyway, when Charlotte and Spencer fight, he tells her that he can’t be with someone who cares about her career more than her family, and then this is immediately followed up with a scene in which Charlotte is nasty to her family and her sister accuses her of not being home when their dad needed her most (right before his death) because she was off in New York starting her fashion career, and this is kind of when the movie lost me, because we’re clearly meant to glean that being a Career Woman in the City is Bad.
ALSO. Spoilers, but: Charlotte does make it to the design competition, but when she gets there, the show is pushed back an hour and a half, but she has to get back to CT for the last Capades event. The models are already in the (slightly better but not groundbreaking) pajamas, and Charlotte probably could have let them walk in the runway show without her, but instead, she makes the models change and withdraws from the competition because “family comes first.” But THEN, this professional misbehavior is rewarded when the head of the department store appreciates her family values and offers Charlotte a job! What the actual?
Should you track it down on streaming? Nah. The leads have good chemistry, but it’s a little paint-by-numbers and the last half hour of it lit my hair on fire. Like, fine, I believe in good work-life balance, but Charlotte basically gives up her dream career of running a fancy boutique for a dude, and I am not on board with that.
***
Title: A Merry Scottish Christmas
Network: Hallmark
Notable Stars: Lacey Chabert, Scott Wolf
Premise: It’s a Party of Five reunion! Estranged siblings reunite at Scottish Cliché Castle.
Plotty Stuff: Brad (Wolf) and Lindsay (Chabert) are siblings who arrive in Scotland for Christmas at the request of their mother. Both are career driven and seem to hate each other. The car from the airport takes them and Brad’s wife, Sarah (Kellie Blaise), to Glencrave Castle, and they get pulled into a tour until they run into their mother, Jo (Fiona Bell) and the butler, who escort them to their rooms while acting very suspicious. Lindsay tries to make a phone call but has to go outside to get a signal, where she runs into a handsome beardy dude (James Robinson). Brad and Lindsay are cranky and jet-lagged and go to bed, but are woken up the next morning by bagpipes, something that happens every morning like this is Balmoral. Lindsay and Brad snoop around and… let me cut to the chase here, because there’s a flashback scene and some convoluted Not How Any of This Works stuff about how titles are inherited that boils down to Jo being the Duchess of Glencrave, something she never got around to mentioning to her family. Rather than being thrilled that they are now heirs to this beautiful Scottish castle, Brad and Lindsay are pissed. They storm off together and hash out some of their differences (mostly it boils down to them both being very busy and not making time for each other) and while they’re out, they run into the beardy dude again, and Brad pulls the old, “Sure, we’d love a tour, oh wait I think I hear my wife calling” and then Beardy (his name is Mac) takes Lindsay on a tour of the Glencrave grounds. When they get back to the castle, Jo says she doesn’t think she can take care of the castle she has recently inherited, so she offers it to her children and is like “if you don’t take it, I’ll have to sell an estate that has been in the family for 700 years…” which is a hell of a guilt trip. Brad and Lindsay don’t know what to do, since they have lives in the States and they just found out they’re Scottish nobles thirty seconds ago. Requisite visit to the town’s holiday festival ensues, dancing and merriment, etc., and Brad and Lindsay end up in a bar; they talk out their differences some more, Brad admits he is extra stressed because he and Sarah are having fertility issues, which is causing some issues in their marriage. He and Lindsay decide to at least stay in Scotland until after Christmas. The next morning, Mac falls off his horse and needs a doctor, so Lindsay is recruited to help because she is a doctor. Mac’s mother runs the local health clinic and, oh, wouldn’t you know it, she’s trying to hire another doctor for it. Later, Mac — who I thought was a groundskeeper but I guess was the late duke’s assistant? — gives a speech about how managing the estate is a big job, and then he offers Lindsay his help because he knows the castle and its business so well. Next, the whole family goes to a party in town, and when Mac escorts everyone home, he and Lindsay are alone briefly and he kisses her. There’s some wheel spinning while Brad and Lindsay try to decide what to do about the castle, and then Jo gets a call from their estate agent who suggests breaking up the estate, which lights a fire under them all to decide to keep it in the family. Initially, they decide to hire Mac to run it, but a bonny Scottish bartender gives Brad a speech about how blood is what makes Glencrave special, so Brad decides to “take the title” of duke, as if that’s how this works, and, with fifteen minutes to go, he announces this and Lindsay gets mad he decided without consulting with her. She’s planning to go back to California, but Mac begs her to stay. In the end, there’s a big Christmas Ball, with many kilts but also ballgowns. So it comes down to: What will Lindsay decide to do? Will she stay and continue patching things up with her family or will she go?
Holiday-Related Activities the Characters Engage in While Falling in Love: The movie is really about Lindsay and Brad making amends. But Mac takes Lindsay to cut down a tree and plant a replacement. They do some traditional Scottish dancing. The whole family and Mac are recruited to judge a Scotch tasting contest. They round up Shetland ponies, which Mac claims symbolizes the holidays somehow. They drink a hot chocolate concoction called “The Dirty Reindeer.” “Santa” shows up at one point. (It’s Scott Wolf in a Santa costume.)
Character or Town with a Cute Christmassy Name: None, alas. I’m not even sure “Glencrave” is an authentic-sounding Scottish name.
Hallmarkian Career Paths: Lindsay is a big-city doctor who runs a clinic. Brad… also has a job that requires him to sit at a laptop a lot. I don’t think they ever say what it is. It doesn’t matter, because he quits it to manage Glencrave.
Other Hallmark Cliches: Hallmark movie mainstay Will Kemp has a cameo, playing Mac’s brother-in-law, and there’s a gag where Lindsay is like, “Do I know you? Have we met before?” because he and Lacey Chabert have been in a Hallmark movie together. (2020’s The Christmas Waltz.)
Notable Coats: Nothing that stood out, but there are a lot of kilts. Lindsay’s ballgown in the ball scene is gorgeous.
Does It Snow? No. Disappointing lack of snow this year.
Other Thoughts: Wolf and Chabert are believable as siblings, probably because they played siblings for so long. Both look a little Botoxed if you haven’t seen them in a minute.
The greatest affront to my sensibilities (as an Anglophile descended from Scotch-Irish folk) is that none of the tartans match in the ball scene; Lindsay and Brad wear different red and green tartans, and Brad admits he has on shorts under his kilt, and none of this is correct. Anyway, this is as good an excuse as any to demonstrate that the Welsh branch of my family has a tartan that is basically Christmas as plaid. I mean:
Just saying.
Should you track it down on streaming? Yes. This one actually manages the short running time well, and squeezes in some great character development. You have to suspend your disbelief about a few things — I’m not convinced anyone who wrote the script has ever even been to Scotland — but that stuff is mostly easy to overlook.
That’s it for now! More recaps coming your way soon!