The Best & Battiest Moments From This Past Weekend’s Holiday Movies
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‘Tis the season to be merry and watch every new holiday movie as it debuts. Each Monday, we’ll take a look back at the previous weekend’s premieres to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year with a new list of superlatives.
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Most Heated Debate
Great American Family’s Christmas Keepsake should come with a trigger warning for households that share different opinions on canned vs. homemade cranberry sauce. Some people don’t like to involve orange zest, Elizabeth (Jillian Murray)! Leave Tom (Daniel Lissing) alone!
Most Unexpected Way to Show the Heroine is in the Big Bad City at the Start of the Movie
Beyoncé-esque Angel St. James (DaniLeigh) using the elevator in her Los Angeles home in BET+’s Christmas Angel was a nice change from the stock-footage establishing shot of New York City we’ve come to expect.
Most Beautiful Tribute Tree
The lighted lobster trap tree with buoys memorializing fishermen lost at sea in Hallmark Channel’s Christmas Island was a unique, moving sight. We did find the historical society’s remembrance tree with ornaments honoring late loved ones in Hallmark Movies & Mysteries’ Mystery at Mistletoe Lane to be touching as well.
Most Popular Trends
We’ve stopped counting mistletoes kisses, but this week we had: two attempts to terrorize children with a mention of Belsnickel visiting the naughty ones (Hallmark Channel’s A Heidelberg Holiday and Christmas Island with Andrew Walker, pictured); two plots involving “time capsules” (Christmas Keepsake and UPtv’s Christmas Time Capsule); two tow-truck-driver meet-cutes (Hallmark Channel’s Everything Christmas and BET+’s Christmas Angel); and two daughters who stopped participating in holiday traditions after losing their father (Christmas Keepsake and Christmas Island).
Character We’d Most Like to See Again
It took us a minute to warm to enigmatic Otto (Jesse Hutch) in Great American Family’s A Christmas Blessing, but once we suspected he was a guardian angel working to make a late aunt’s last wish come true for her niece, Mandy (Lori Loughlin), we were all in. We hope the network makes him the center of an anthology franchise, and that he’s back next year, looking down from another rooftop like he’s Spider-Man and snapping his fingers to make it snow for a different couple’s first kiss.
Worst Business Decision
A Heidelberg Holiday artist Heidi (Ginna Claire Mason) should have known not to risk using the cheap shipping service when mailing glass ornaments to Germany to sell at her dream market. And while it is common practice for artisans to watch each other’s booths for meal and bathroom breaks, Heidi definitely abused her neighbors’ kindness. That said, Heidelberg did look stunning (the movie was filmed there and in Belgrade, Serbia), so good for Heidi for sightseeing.
Easiest Tradition to Steal
In A Heidelberg Holiday, American Heidi taught her German host family about Stocking Secrets: Everyone writes down a goal or wish for the holiday season and puts it in the toe of their stocking. You only reveal it if and when you achieve it. Sounds like a nice way to give stockings a pre-Christmas Eve purpose and to find the biggest snoop in the house. Also, FYI: Heidelberg is famous for chocolates known as Student Kiss, though secret admirers aren’t the only folks who give them.
Least Popular Coworker
If Everything Christmas’ LJ (Cindy Busby) wants to deck her cubicle, wear antlers, and quit her job because her boss demanded she work over the holidays instead of taking her long-planned, meaningful pilgrimage to Yuletide Springs, cool. We support her. But no one wants a colleague who sings “Jingle Bells” loudly at their desk in an open office floorplan.
Biggest Law Suit Waiting to Happen
Yuletide Springs gives people that rickety step ladder to hang their ornaments?! As annoyed as we get when a man catches a falling damsel so they can lock eyes in a Christmas movie, it would have made sense if LJ’s best friend in Everything Christmas had spotted her considering the circumstances. (The payoff, however, was solid: We got misty when LJ realized “Kris Kringle” had given her a gift certificate to a store where she’d find an exact replica of the ornament she’d shattered.)
Romantic Cliché We’d Be Most Happy to Outlaw
The hands-touching food-preparation shot. We stomached it last week when bread was kneaded in A Dash of Christmas, but the onion-chopping in A Christmas Blessing pushed us over the edge.
Most Gratuitous Shirtless Scene
Did Army vet James (Franco Lo Presti) need to take off the T-shirt he’d slept in to do those morning pushups in Christmas Time Capsule? No. But we — and his platonic best friend, Tiffany (Emily Alatalo) — thank him again for his service.
Sexiest Xmas Sweater
“You can barely see that sweater,” you say. Doesn’t matter. Not when Christmas Times Capsule’s James is looking at Tiff like that, post-French kiss (always a surprise to see tongue in TV rom-coms!) and pre-proposing to her with the heirloom engagement ring he’d given her to hold before he enlisted: “You kept this safe for a decade. Can I keep you safe for a lifetime?” Damn, that was good.
Sweetest Moment
Anyone who’s lost a parent, for any reason, knows how special it would be to find something they left for you years later. Wallace (Fred Henderson) finishing the secret Christmas-themed treasure hunt that his father had staged for him when he was only a boy was a tissue moment in Mystery at Mistletoe Lane. The discovery didn’t change the fact that Wallace had grown up without him, but it gave Wallace back a relationship with his own son, his childhood home, and Christmas.
Christmas Time Is Here! Your Guide to 100+ Holiday Movies on Hallmark, Lifetime, Netflix and Others
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