Nostalgic Christmas premiered on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries' Miracles of Christmas on October 31st and stars Brooke D'Orsay and Trevor Donovan.
RATING (out of 5): 🎄🎄🎄
General Movie Details: single career girl (Anne) goes home to small Maine hometown (from NYC) to help Dad close down his toy store and retire, widowed single dad (Keith) in same small Maine town is trying to keep the local mill he runs from being sold and closing, they wind up co-chairing the Christmas Committee and realize in the process that it is difficult for them both to say goodbye to a town they love and call home. Theme of remember what really means something to you.
Meet Cute Moment: Keith's daughter forgot to get a toy for the toy drive so they convince Anne to open up the toy store to remedy their toy emergency. While his daughter finds the perfect toy, Keith proceeds to praise the quality of her Dad's toys while putting down both the quality of the new high tech toys sold elsewhere and the buyer of said toys (her).
Notable Handmade Alert: Hand carved Santas! Not only are they something to behold but the individualized names and tags... I wish I knew where I could get my hand's on the advent calendar Anne swiped the descriptions from. I may not be able to carve wood but I could see those tags and descriptions in some future applications. Nutcrackers, anyone? Ah, a project for another day!
Obligatory moment of snark/personal rant: So, I love the fact that she is a corporate working girl but still takes off basically the whole month of December. This isn't snark, I know people who do this and applaud them for making it happen. Yeah for vacation, no bah humbug here! Fear not, there is plenty to poke at in this film. Let's start off with timing in the film, it's 3 weeks until Christmas and they are just getting around to putting together the Committees to plan the town festivities. I LOVE that Anne points out that they seem to be off to a late start. I kind of love a movie that can poke fun at itself, a bit of an elbow nudge and wink here. Beyond the timing until Christmas, let's talk about geography for a minute... Anne says it's a 5 hour train trip from NYC to Maine. I heard this and immediately called FOUL. I looked online and seems that the typical trip from NYC to Portland, Maine is about 8 hours but the quickest on Amtrak is just over 6 hours. I guess in a world where you can build a Christmas Village in under 3 weeks, of course the trip would be quicker too! Just in case you were curious, the culmination of the town's Christmas festivities is... you guessed it, a pageant on Christmas Eve.
Hallmark Movie Connection: Brooke D'Orsay was also in Christmas in Love (2018) with Daniel Lissing (another 3+ tree holiday film, if you can catch it). Trevor Donovan was also in Snowcoming (2019) with Lindy Booth.
Hallmark, I'm looking at you: I want to take a quick moment to ask a question, is there really any possible justification for having a Christmas movie premiere on Halloween??? I think not Hallmark, and you're breaking my heart already with the all Christmas, all the time even before Halloween. Please put the orange, gold, pumpkin, candy and costumes back in Halloween. Forgetting about the fact there's another big holiday, Thanksgiving, still on the horizon that you've decided to pass right over. Plea (falling on deaf ears) over and now it is time to embrace Hallmark for it's commercialism. I am actually surprised it's taken this long to try to further monetize Countdown to Christmas and the networks with merch. While some may go for wine glasses and socks, I am all in for the idea of Hallmark movie bingo. I was initially thinking that this might need to be in my stocking this year, but I really wished that they had an alternative movie bingo set that could be used year round. Then I did a bit of Googling and found the game put together by Missy Kellor (going back to 2017) and am thinking that I am going to partake in the free card options and may pull in some of the prior year's cards as well. I checked out her 2018 post and am thinking that some of her ideas are just the inspiration I need to create my own year round Hallmark movie bingo set or even seasonally if I need more craft plans in my life.
Who is in for some Hallmark bingo with me? Keep an eye on a stocking near you because I know a few people in my life who would appreciate some Hallmark bingo cards, just throwing it out there.
Let me know if you too felt that Hallmark was hitting a bit more of their stride with this one. I'll admit that I've liked some of the casts previous movies so it might be my own biases here as well.
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