Netflix Original Christmas Movies: A Guide to the Cheesy Holiday Flicks
If you’ve looked even slightly in the direction of Twitter this holiday season, you’re sure to have seen memes, quips, and tirades about the wonderfully goofy slate of Christmas movies on Netflix. First came 2017’s A Christmas Prince and its penchant for bad journalism and Converse shoes paired with ball gowns. It was promptly joined by small-town charmer Christmas Inheritance. And this year, Netflix added a royal sequel and two new stories to its holiday collection: A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, The Princess Switch, and The Holiday Calendar. The latter two even shamelessly (and hilariously) reference their sisters in holiday rom-com-dom by having the lead characters literally flip through Netflix and watch last year’s flicks.
These movies, and their brazenly ridiculous plots and details, couldn’t be more perfect for the second most basic holiday of the year (Halloween is the first, obvi) if they were replaced with a 24-hour loop of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” wafting over a never-ending fountain of Peppermint Mochas and a field of perfectly Instagrammable snowflake sugar cookies. But, in case you’ve yet to wade in the schmaltzy waters of the Netflix original holiday movie landscape, here’s a rundown of what you can expect when you’re ready to throw caution to the wind, sprinkle some red sugar crystals on top of your perfect hot cocoa, snuggle up with the coziest blanket you can find, and marathon these festive flicks.
The Royal Original: A Christmas Prince
This is the movie that started a phenomenon. It made sense that Netflix would start producing its own original holiday films, but I don’t think anyone was prepared for the cheesy wonder of this royal caper. Our heroine, native New Yorker and Converse-enthusiast Amber Moore (iZombie star Rose McIver) gets the assignment of a lifetime: to report on the potential abdication of the throne in the country of Aldovia (not a real place, but fictionally exists somewhere in Europe) and through a series of totally avoidable mishaps, winds up going undercover in the castle to get a scoop. The only problem? The titular prince (played by Ben Lamb), who’s been billed as a partier and a playboy in the media, is actually the sweetest, most charitable, rom-com-iest dreamboat around and she starts falling for him. (If you sense a similarity to a certain red-headed English prince’s life, you wouldn’t be totally wrong.)
This movie literally has it all. There’s action: the movie lovingly rips a page out of the Beauty and the Beast playbook and has the prince save Amber from wolves attacking her in the woods. There’s friendship: Amber befriends the prince’s little sister, who is the requisite wise child that is needed in every cheesy holiday rom-com. There are inexplicable moments: my favorite is when Amber has a rational conversation with her horse about going back to the castle (this is not a magical horse that is somehow able to answer back). There’s drama: the prince’s ex-girlfriend and cousin team up to attempt to steal his crown after suspiciously sneering throughout the first half of the movie. And of course, there’s romance. And if that wasn’t enough, the prince’s coronation and his eventual big sweeping kiss with Amber all coincide with Christmas, a.k.a. the single most important day of the year in Aldovia, the most Christmas-obsessed country of all time.
The Small Town Romance: Christmas Inheritance
All of Netflix’s holiday offerings are clear nods to the corny holiday movie inventors over at Hallmark, but Christmas Inheritance is the biggest nod of all. It has the classic "City Girl Out of Place In a Small Town" played by The 100's Eliza Taylor and a glass ceiling-busting twist in which the city girl doesn’t give up her ambition to be a CEO, and still gets to win over the guy. Plus, it doesn’t skimp on the ridiculous antics we expect from a holiday movie of this sorts.
“Party Heiress” Ellen Langford is in danger of not getting her Christmas inheritance, which is to become CEO of her father’s company, all because she secured a huge donation for Toys For Tots by doing a somersault on a dare at a classy party. (It really would appear that the net gain here is more money for charity, which is good, but the local papers and Ellen’s father don’t seem to agree. Also, doesn't help that she flips right into a Christmas tree and knocks it over.) So, in order to prove that she can run the company, Ellen’s dad sends her on an errand to Snow Falls, the town in which he started his company. He gives her the unfathomable amount of $100 to pay her way and takes all of her credit cards, which gives her the opportunity to run out of money and show her true colors to small town hunk Jake by helping out around the town and baking with his marvelously wise aunt. But her quaint little holiday is disrupted when her stuck-up, snooty fiancé shows up. And along the way, we get to enjoy hearing the lyrics of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” changed to “We wish you a crazy Christmas, We wish you a naughty Christmas,” the answer to the question “Can you blow up a vacuum by sucking up a pair of boxers into it?” (the answer, in this universe, is a resounding “yes”), and the meanest, most self-obsessed romantic rival who makes Gaston look good.
The Parent Trap Meets The Princess Diaries: The Princess Switch
The Vanessa Hudgens movie finds Stacy De Novo, a regular gal and baker from Chicago (you know because she wears a Chicago hat for practically the entire movie), flying to Belgravia (yet another fake country a la Aldovia) to compete in an annual televised baking competition. When she meets the Belgravian prince’s fiancée, Lady Margaret, her twin — who’s not really her twin, just a long lost fourth cousin a couple times removed who happens to be identical to her — the two decide to switch places for a few days. Everything is going all dandy, of course, until romance creeps up on them while living out each other's lives and the men they're falling for don't know their true identities. The entire movie, from that point on, is pretty much a love story where two people who love schedules find each other (Stacy and the prince) and two people who hate schedules fall for one another (Lady Margaret and Stacy’s BFF/sous chef). In fact, the characters say the word “schedule” in this movie so many times, it almost qualifies as a secondary character. Additionally, and somewhat unnecessarily, there is also a magical old man who appears in Chicago and Belgravia with two alternating accents who doesn’t appear to really help with anything, but is certainly invested in the romantic plot.
And while the plot and the characters’ hijinks are great and all (along with Vanessa trying to pull off what a royal person thinks how a Chicago accent sounds like), the real fun is in the way in which the movie seemingly references classics like The Princess Diaries and The Parent Trap. There's that Julie Andrews-inspired walk that Lady Margaret does in the life-swap montage which brought us back to the Genovia tale. The entire plot screams The Parent Trap, but we really felt the vibes in the scene where Lady Margaret and Stacy are almost caught because they're chatting on the phone. Lady Margaret then yells "get out" in a so-so English accent that's sure to remind you of Lindsay Lohan in the beloved ‘90s movie.
The Wild Card: The Holiday Calendar
Most of the Netflix holiday movies are pretty predictable, but The Holiday Calendar throws audiences for a bit of a loop. Abby (Kat Graham) and Josh (Quincy Brown) are lifelong BFFs who definitely don’t want to date, even though Josh lovingly plays with Abby’s hair while she sleeps. When her magical holiday calendar brings a cute doctor into her life, Josh gets jealous and it becomes unclear who she’ll end up choosing. OK, so it’s not that unpredictable and we all know who she’ll choose in the end, but, it’s got some serious it factors: a wise grandpa who speaks in cryptic phrases, a closing credits song that narrates the movie's entire plot and is performed by the two romantic leads, and of course, a magic advent calendar that tells Abby who she should be in love with (how helpful!).
But unrequited feelings of love and literal holiday magic aside, one of the best things about this movie are the ridiculous original Christmas songs peppered throughout. Not only do we get a reprisal of the “crazy” version of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” first heard in Christmas Inheritance, we also get some truly ingenious holiday lyrics like “Do you think Santa would mind / If I borrowed his mind?” and “Hey baby, I’m coming down your chimney tonight.”
The One For People Who Love Harry and Meghan: A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding
The much-anticipated sequel to the Netflix original that started the craze,* A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding* also serves as a wild, totally fabricated parallel to the real life royal couple that continually arrests our attention: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. While there’s no way of truly knowing what goes down behind palace doors, the swirling reports of Meghan being told what not to wear, the fact that her family are a bunch of regular folks from the States, and the way that Prince Harry looks at her that has us totally emotional, all of this royal hubbub is given the bizarro treatment in this second helping of Aldovian Christmas antics.
Amber, soon to be Queen Amber, finds herself suddenly stuck in stuffy, ugly dresses in the name of decorum and tradition and sees her apparently very popular blog (simply titled “Amber’s Blog”) deleted almost in its entirety as her wedding to the prince approaches. Throughout all of this, Aldovia is on the brink of spiraling into ruin after a financial fiasco and the royal staff threatens to faint from the impropriety every time Amber’s diner-owning New Yorker father tries to convince the palace chef to make something other than “meat jelly.” Meanwhile, Amber uses the investigative journalism skills she decided not to use in the original movie to look for the villain causing all the money to drain out of Aldovia, and she is naturally reprimanded for doing so. Honestly, things get pretty serious, but the eventual happy ending involves an actual conga line, so it all balances out.
The sequel is admittedly not nearly as entertaining as the original, but it’s still a good time as the film drips with holiday decorations and leads up to the Christmas Day nuptials while we all wait with baited breath to see if Amber will ditch her heels once again and wear Converses with her fancy wedding dress. (Spoiler: Of course she does.)
Related: Did You Spot the Body Double Mistake in Vanessa Hudgens's New Movie The Princess Switch?
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