For commentary on this movie from an actual resident of one of the islands depicted in this film, check out this article: https://www.vox.com/…/netflix-guam-holiday-movies…

Tl;dr, because this is a long one, this movie heard the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and said, “WELL THEY’RE GONNA”

When I saw the title of this movie, I prepared for bad, white-saviory vibes. I prepped for Sharing Christmas With The World Is Important! I was ready to face what I believed was a knock-off of Operation Christmas Child, the Samaritan’s Purse project involving shoeboxes, and entered this Netflix original endeavor primed to discuss how shipping cheaply-made corporate goods to economically oppressed areas actually perpetuates the instability in those areas, and Operation Christmas Child should, if it is to continue, simply be a go-between for local markets and local residents. I was woefully unequipped for the elephantine barrage of propaganda that threw itself at me, clawing at my computer screen to be released and unleashed on the world.

Operation Christmas Drop, we soon learned, is a real thing that the real US Military has been doing in Micronesia for almost 70 years. To give the military the benefit of the doubt, which it doesn’t deserve, is to wonder “hey, maybe there were places hit really hard by World War II that could have used the extra stuff.” But again, the United States does not deserve that, because that’s not what happened. On to the movie itself.

Erica Miller is a put-upon congressional aide who is sent, two weeks before Christmas, to Guam. The congresswoman she works for needs her to gather intel on the Air Force base there, so that she can present a proposition to shut it down in committee. It’s assumed that if Erica puts together a report of the activities on the base, it will immediately get shut down by the actions of this single congresswoman, as if congresspeople have that power. God, if only. Erica meets Captain Jantz, who goes by his call sign “Claws”, and he shows her around the base. And by “shows her around the base”, I mean he complains and condescends to her about how to do her job, and tries to Ghost of Christmas Marley her about the important work they’re doing for the poor, impoverished, helpless island dwellers! Erica can’t believe how much Christmas is happening here, and is also surprised that apparently every item of food, supplies, and toys are donated by Guam locals or soldiers on the base. Gecko friendship, Christmas Snorkeling, and awkward dancing at a party ensue, leading Erica and CLAWS closer together. He takes Erica to An Island Of Natives who are dirt poor and apparently keep a ukulele around that only Jantz knows how to play. Erica feels bad and gives some children the entire contents of her purse (see Vox article for deets). She’s quickly Ebenezered and starts going all in for Operation Christmas Drop, because It’s The Right Thing To Do, and her new pilot friends convince her not to write a totally honest report for the committee.

Unfortunately, her Congresswoman Boss appears right as the last parcels are being packed! Erica, you’re off the project! You were supposed to get dirt to help me end this FRIVOLOUS, MONEY-WASTING NONSENSE. Honestly, Congresswoman? You’re right. There’s zero reason for this base to exist, especially when their main functions seem to be proselytizing, destabilizing local economies, and destroying the environment. Of course, because this movie is just a spray bottle of propaganda, Erica decides now is the time to have her say. She is going to Stand Up For the Little Guy! And that little guy happens to be the $500 billion military industrial complex. Pardon me while I bash my head into the wall to stop from heaving.

Captain Jantz convinces the Congresswoman to join them on the final drop, and watch the quaint little islanders receive their LIVE-SAVING rubber balls and Cheetos. This changes her mind immediately, and she promotes Erica to be her new chief of staff. Erica and Jantz kiss and his family’s there. The end. Yay.

I know I’m droning on, but this movie was just the worst thing I’ve seen this year, and definitely the worst thing I’ve seen since Avengers: Endgame. It’s not even one of those fun bad movies like The Room or Troll 2 or Merry Kissmas. It’s just the most obviously Department of Defense funded film I’ve ever seen in my life. Imagine a firehose full of unfettered, unquestioningly loyal imperialist military propaganda. This movie believes you are on fire. This is the kind of insidious bullshit people will just EAT UP without considering the consequences of American invasion into other cultures. This movie has decided that you will see Captain Jantz as a modern Robin Hood, because if there’s one thing the US Military is good at, it’s playing both victim and hero simultaneously. Jantz is not Robin Hood. He’s no one in that story (Auth. note: maybe he’s Guy of Gisborne, showering Marian with gifts she doesn’t want? is that a thing in the stories or just on the BBC show from fifteen years ago? Sorry, y’all, I’m in a phase, back to the movie:). The US Military is not some charitable, kindness-driven institution. It’s a tool of war and colonization. Did they have to give dramamine to these actors to stop them from vomiting with all this garbage in their mouths?

Okay, enough soapbox. Here’s the goofy stupid parts of the movie: uh, a bad CGI gecko, bad music, awful dancing. Oh! Guess what his call sign CLAWS stands for. Guess. You won’t.

It’s Can’t Leave Anyone Without Santa. How did someone get paid to write this and I can’t even get a copy editing job?

WHIMSY: 0.5/5 elf ears for the gecko, who was not in enough scenes.
SPARKLE FACTOR: 1/5 twinkly lights. Beautiful scenery soured by massive military presence and constant reminders that US Military have BIG BOAT AND BIG PLANE
ADORKABILITY: 0.5/5 faceplants. Would be zero but there’s a scene where Erica dances like, VERY badly and it made me laugh
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 8/5 Santa hats. Shoehorned garbage, but it’s ubiquitous shoehorned garbage.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: -1/5 silver bells. This is the second movie I’ve watched this year that does a Christmas Bells cover, which again, is a sad despairing poem about the civil war. And there’s a scene where the white man is the only one who can play the village’s single ukulele.
REASON FOR SEASON: Making a movie with a Black protagonist still be racist!

My wonderful sister Rose penned the review for this year’s much-discussed Lesbian Lovefest!

In a departure from our regularly scheduled program, I’m going to do a brief non-spoilery review of Happiest Season, since that’s getting some views and I think a lot of people will want to watch it. So, onward.

First, I think that gay people should get to make schlocky romance and Christmas films until the market is saturated, and pinning all your hopes for a perfect representation of…anything at all, in one film, is a mistake. Second, this isn’t schlock at all; the script is pretty tight, the editing is solid, and it’s overall well-made. If you’re straight, or if you somehow missed the existence of this movie, it’s a Clea Duvall film starring Kristen Stewart and Yorkie from “San Junipero” as well as Aubrey Plaza, Victor Garber, and Dan Levy. Yeah. The whole gang’s here.

Abby (K-Stew) and Harper (Yorkie) are long-term cohabiting girlfriends, and Abby has just bought a ring. Abby, an orphan, just isn’t that into Christmas, while Harper, whose family is an appearances-obsessed nightmare, is totally into Christmas–or maybe she just has to be. Harper wants Abby to feel the Christmas spirit, so in a moment of passion, she invites her home for the holidays. It all starts to go awry when, halfway to the distant suburban family mansion, Harper confesses that she has never come out to her family and in fact lied to Abby about it last summer. We’ve all been there.

What follows is a charming, awkward, uncomfortable, comical mess that at times feels a bit too real. There’s sneaking. There’s sibling rivalry. There’s that terrible feeling of being a guest in someone’s house with your own room and having to wait to be escorted into the world when you wake up too early or too late or–My point is, there are some things the movie gets across all too well.

I liked it. There’s some discourse on the twitters about how someone is a terrible girlfriend but okay, it’s a Christmas romance flick, there’s gonna be conflict, it’s gonna be a mess, people are complicated and they make mistakes and they’re a product of their environment and their choices, and like I said, gay people should get to have good and bad films just like straight people. The only real criticism I have in that respect is that there are three Black characters and they’re all like…bad. Or at least, they misbehave terribly, and they’re not big enough characters for that to be deep or interesting. That said, just about everyone does bad stuff in the movie, so I think it’s worth noting, but I’m not sure it’s a major mark against it. In positive news, Harper’s middle sister Jane is someone I think a lot of people can relate to, and John (Levy) serves us both comedic and heavy, real moments.

WHIMSY: 4/5 elf ears. A rogue roomba. Ice skating. Jane’s novels.
SPARKLE FACTOR: 4/5 twinkly lights. The movie opens on a Christmas decorations walking tour.
ADORKABILITY: 5/5 face plants. There are sibling fights. There is K-Stew pretending to be heterosexual. There is Jane.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 3/5 santa hats. The parties seem less Christmas and more political stuff for Harper’s dad, and no one is particularly obsessed with Christmas as a concept, but there are trees and gift exchanges and cookies and all.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 2/5 silver bells. There’s a soundtrack. It’s ehh. It’s fine. There’s no notable Christmas music moment, unless you count five seconds of Alison Brie’s evil twins singing Silent Night when they definitely don’t want to.
REASON FOR SEASON: Lesbians! Also weird kid/gay solidarity.

Why is it that Rose and I end up watching these bizarre indie-foreign-vibe flicks with actors who give the general impression that their mothers made them do this for their neighbor’s son’s filmmaking portfolio? Last year Clara’s Ultimate Christmas, this year Clara’s Ultimate Christmas, Again. If you put these two on a Good Movie balance scale, Clara would just barely eke out a victory over Christmas, Again with its superior yet still meager offering of plot points, characters who enjoy existing, and colors.

You know how sometimes I get caught up in explaining these bonkers plots? Well, fear not, because this movie removes that troublesome net entirely by having no plot! Here is the entire movie, without leaving anything important out, summed up in 26 words: A guy sells Christmas trees and lives in a small trailer. Eventually, and accidentally, he kisses a woman in that trailer, and then he leaves town. 

“Christmas Tree Night Shift Salesman Meets Colorful Characters” is a perfectly fine premise for a silly and clumsy film that would end up doing reruns on the Hallmark Channel for the rest of time, if it doesn’t already exist, but this movie is so devoid of any interesting moments that Rose and I were constantly pausing to check how many more minutes were left (We’re doing this for you, dear readers). As I looked over my notes, I remembered a few things that had apparently occurred during the course of this film that by the end of it I had forgotten, since no consequences exist in this universe. Examples include: our protagonist Noel’s face is served a knuckle sandwich in the middle of the night, Noel catches his blanket on fire, and he listens to a radio play from the ‘40s, which is the closest to a whiff of a narrative we get from this thing. The two things I did remember: Advent calendar of unnamed pills, the purpose of which will never even be hinted at; and a tea flower, which blooms while Noel and Unnamed Woman watch–I assume it bloomed, at least, since the camera only managed to capture Noel and Unnamed Woman’s reactions to its implied bloom in a single 90-second shot. 

Don’t be fooled by my earlier assertion that it has foreign film vibes. Sad Italian movies are more charming, and watching someone fold laundry in the underground of a bustling foreign city for 80 minutes would be more interesting. Watching someone fold laundry anywhere would be more interesting. Christmas, Again will be Christmas, No More in this house.

WHIMSY: 0/5 elf ears. Not the slightest whiff of whimsy to be found in this depressing nighttime snoozefest. 

SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨ 2/5 twinkly lights. There were some nice lights to see, and the flower was pretty.

ADORKABILITY: 🙃 1/5 face plants for Noel wrestling with three Christmas trees while talking to a customer. 

CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅 2/5 santa hats. He’s selling Christmas trees, but that does not make it feel much like Christmas.

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. As Tamal from bakeoff would say, “Decisions, decisions, all of them wrong.” Only reason it has one is because I’m sentimental and they used the Arabian music from the Nutcracker. 

REASON FOR SEASON: Trying to make an art film without ever having watched one!📽️🎬🙅

PS: This man’s parents need a stern talking-to. Kentucker Audley??

Nota Bene: this wasn’t the movie we planned to watch today, but after 10 joyless, painfully hetero, unwatchable minutes of His and Her Christmas, we just couldn’t bear it anymore and switched to this one, which was better suited to our purposes. May try that one again later, but don’t count on it. 

If you came into this holiday season feeling a little Scroogey, you’re not alone! So is Jen Robbins, a [something] columnist living in the town of [never said], [unclear], despite the best efforts of her angelic 7-year-old son. Jen’s husband walked out on them on Christmas Eve six years ago, so it’s a sore time of year for Jen, who is nonetheless tasked with writing an “article” about The Christmas Spirit. At the behest of Fun Friend Suzie, Jen takes her son Eric to meet Santa, who could not more clearly be a young man in a beard and suit. There’s a lot of stuff that happens, and only some of it feels particularly relevant, so here’s the gist:

Chris is Santa’s son, who needs to bring home a wife this year, leaving by midnight on Christmas Eve, or…something…will happen…. Not once is any utterance made regarding the consequences of Chris remaining a bachelor for another Christmas, but Jerry from Parks and Rec is there as helpful elf Jack to remind him that his dad is approximately two shakes of a reindeer’s tail from kicking the bucket, so he needs to get going on the lady front. Jen can’t afford to buy her son a Maxim Man action figure, despite living in an enormous, spacious, beautifully constructed house, except then in act three she totally can, she just waited too long and Maxim Man is way out of stock. Eric, of course, asks Santa for a Maxim Man, but Chris already KNEW that’s what he wanted, because one of his Santa Powers is knowing the wishlists of every child. Other such abilities are revealed throughout the course of the movie, growing ever stronger as he and Jen get closer. Abilities include: manifesting cookies and crappy hot chocolate, “uncooking” burnt turkey, occasional mind control/suggestion [auth note: YIKES], knowing Jen was going to come get a tree, knowing where Jen lives, knowing where Jen went on Christmas Eve when she was younger, manifesting presents, and knowing which children are Naughty and which are Nice. At the end, he makes it snow, or maybe it just snows, it’s unclear. 

The dialogue of this movie sounded like someone who had never set foot in any part of North America or even met an American or Canadian person wrote it. The odd formality with which these adults address each other and children is quickly abandoned for perhaps less sophisticated lines such as “HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!” and “a PICTURE!” It boggles the mind how scripts make it to film without being read by anyone before production begins. 

Jen reacts to things like a sensible person, which makes it all the weirder when she decides after less than a week that she has fallen deeply in love with Chris. While I can’t blame her for believing in magic after he magically makes a Maxim Man appear in her house for Eric, and a small Precious Moments ceramic thing for her (it’s relevant, mom stuff, etc), it’s still weird that she then without putting any of her affairs in order decides it’s time to move to the North Pole with Chris and become Jen Claus. But hey, Chris isn’t totally unfortunate-looking.

WHIMSY: 🧝🧝🧝🧝 4/5 elf ears. Chris creates cookies and hot cocoa out of thin air! They go ice skating! He is Santa’s son! Jerry from Parks and Rec is an elf!

SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights. Decor was a big part of Jen’s storyline, but most places didn’t put up any lights until like, the 23rd! Unbelievable! 

ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃 2/5 faceplants. 1 for Mrs. Johnson burning the turkey and 1 for Jen apparently using her entire arms to mix cookie dough, and then going “oops, I better get cleaned up!”

CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. The love interest is Santa’s son, and has Christmas cheer superpowers. I do not know how much more Christmas you can get! 

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔🔔 3/5 silver bells. Kudos to the musicians, but making me hear Jazzy Silent Night when they’re in a bar being decidedly Not Silent was rude, and I don’t think anyone needs Jazzy O Little Town of Bethlehem.

REASON FOR SEASON: Abandoning all your responsibilities to go marry a hot dude who breathes Christmas!😏🎄🎁

CW: gunshot wound (spoiler: it’s a fakeout)

Last year we got a little behind in writing and watching these but managed to post them all by like, Boxing Day. This year I am dragging myself, a mere bag of bones, across the finish line, wheezing my way into the new year after a truly brutal parade of Yuletide nightmares. I didn’t even write all of them this year, and yet here I am, in an emotional fetal position I have only otherwise reached after spending six hours on the bathroom floor with food poisoning: Why do I do this? Will I have the sense to avoid this thankless, miserable toil next year? Almost certainly not. I know myself better than that.

For our 25th final installment of 2019, I bring you “Holly Star”, in which a broke puppeteer, Sloan, has to leave the shiny big city and all her bunraku apparatus to return to her Maine hometown. Her parents are off somewhere on a cruise, but at least her saucy tango-dancing grandma is around and her fun weird best friend, paintball enthusiast Kay K has an extra Airsoft to lend her. She needs money, so she accepts a job working at her high school friend Andy’s Christmas tree lot. This visit home is going pretty well, except that when she inevitably slips on ice and hits her head, Sloan has a puppety vision of the past: someone (Santa??) is burying a treasure in the snow!

But we’ll get back to that. The romance blossoms on schedule as Sloan and Andy grow closer together as they offload the farm’s finest Fraser firs, and Kay K reminds Sloan how to have fun when she SHOOTS HER IN THE GUT. Kay K just hilariously stocked her magazine (these are gun words, right?) with red paintballs, in an attempt to scare her into another vision! SO FUNNY. Andy is appropriately horrified that Sloan would risk her life to find the money (gold?) and storms off after a date. Kay K and Sloan figure out she’s remembering a long-dormant memory that she can only access more of by having a full-on near-death experience. Hoo boy! Later, I think she chokes on…something (candy cane? gingerbread? Tree branch?) and waves off help because she just really needs that cash that’s out there in the snow. This very, very bad plan works, Fun Grandma whacks her on the back so she doesn’t actually die, and Sloan has a sudden “HAAAAY!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS BEDFORD FALLS!!!” moment, rushes out of the party to find Andy at a drive-in showing of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and dumps all her smushy emotions on him when she realizes that all she saw when her life flashed before her eyes was memories of Andy! The death-visions were just showing her the way to Andy! He’s weirded out very briefly, but then they kiss. Kay K attacks from the treeline and they end with a big fun snowball fight!

This movie could have actually been an actual movie with some tighter script work (I mean, it’s not bad, some of the lines actually did make me expel more air out of my nose than usual) and some higher-budget casting would have done wonders (how about Gillian Jacobs and Lauren Ash?). I recommend this one for anyone who bemoans the dearth of puppetry in our modern streaming age.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 5/5 elf ears. Puppets = automatic full marks!
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨✨✨ 5/5 twinkly lights. Maine looks great! Shot on location and everything! I’d spend Christmas there if I was being visited by puppet death harbingers too!
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 5/5 faceplants. God, finally, some truly adorkable fare here! Slipping on the ice and hitting your head so hard you hallucinate? Now that’s a romcom!
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅 3/5 Santa hats. It’s mad festive, but the mystery of “Holly Star” is silly and could have been a summertime escapade if it wanted.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. There’s some “original” “music”.
REASON FOR SEASON: Head trauma! 🤕

The rare threequel makes the penultimate review this year. This one’s a continuation of Queen Amber’s hijinks in the tiny Europeaish country of Aldovia, this time struggling through a diplomatic crisis of ancient Yuletide treaty signing and curse avoidance. Yet even in the third installment, the political and physical geography of this tiny kingdom is still shrouded in mystery: Aldovia is allied with the country of Penglia, which lies east across the Black Sea (near the kingdom of Belgravia, which keen viewers will recognize from another Netflix original Christmas movie “The Princess Switch”), and is home to almost exclusively east Asian actors! Nice DEI work, Netflix!

Queen Amber and King…Richard? Derek? James? are expecting a baby around Christmastime and the Penglian king and queen arrive for a ceremonial treaty-signing that guarantees another hundred years of peace between their kingdoms. Queen Amber has decided that the queens should sign alongside their husbands, but Queen Ming of Penglia is reluctant to accept any credit for any work she’s done, because this patriarchal Asian country is still year behind Amber’s new feminist Aldovia (not a typo, remember, Amber’s only been queen since last Christmas!). But when they go to sign the treaty, IT’S GONE! King Richard suspects his good-for-nothing brother Simon, who’s been getting pretty chummy with the Penglian royals’ cute attaché, has helped the Penglians hide the treaty because he wants to start a war! Because that’s what happens in the event that the treaty isn’t ceremonially re-signed before Christmas. The nations revert to a state of war. I know it’s 400 years old, but like, when was the last time the court lawyers took a look at these terms?!

Compounding the threat of impending dissolution of centuries-old alliances, there’s also the spectre of a curse on the royal firstborn looming over the castle. But don’t worry, that only applies if the treaty isn’t signed, so we have a two-birds-one-stone situation. Queen Amber, great – nay, fabulous – with child, sets about solving the whodunit, cementing the new Aldovian tradition of spending a very tense 24 hours before Christmas trying to ensure their entire system of government doesn’t collapse. Beloved (well, beliked) supporting characters flit in and out, including a toned-down version of the racist caricature of the royal decorator/wardrobe guy, Amber’s best friend who’s now dating Simon the Rake, and the spunky Princess Emily, who is the smartest person in any room and also believes in curses and ghosts. She and Royal Mother unearth the treaty, hidden in the dungeon, at the last minute, as Queen Amber goes into labor! They all j’accuse each other but turns out the loyal footman done it, as his great-great-great etc. grandmother was the Madame Zeroni who issued the curse in the first place and it’s his sacred duty to prevent, or at least inconvenience, the treaty signing. With seconds to spare, the Penglian King and Queen sign and King Richard and Queen Amber sign and it’s Christmas! Then Amber has her baby and IT’S A GIRL OF COURSE and hurray for bland white feminism! It’s easy to do equity work when you’re literally the queen and you want your child to inherit shit.

As forgettable as this cheese puff of a movie is, I’m still deeply troubled by the map. The countries involved here are presented as tiny, tiny nations; yet Aldovia apparently occupies all the land between the Adriatic and the Black Sea (which in our world are mostly former Soviet bloc nations), and if this country is at least 400 years old, WAS THERE NO USSR IN THIS UNIVERSE? Does Russia exist? Because Ukraine doesn’t – it’s Belgravia! Penglia, as the farthest east country we’ve encountered, is naturally populated by an east Asian citizenry. You know, the folks who live in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. So what lies farther east of that? WAS THERE A SILK ROAD IN THIS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE? Where do they get their spices? Did east Asian nations colonize here?! WHERE ARE THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EUROVISION SONG COMPETITIONS?

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. Curses, dungeon ghosts, lighthearted goofins all around.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨✨✨ 5/5 twinkly lights for the production value. Shot on location in Bucharest in a real castle! (Romania is just a part of Aldovia anyway.)
ADORKABILITY: 🙃 1/5 faceplants. I don’t think there’s anyone adorkable here. Queen Amber comports herself with mad dignity now!
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Festive as heck, my dudes, there’s holly and jolly decked all over these palace halls!
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔🔔 3/5 silver bells. Pleasant!
REASON FOR SEASON: Getting everything done at the last minute! ⌚️

A wealthy socialite is hosting a big Toys for Tots fundraiser and gets dared to show off some of her gymnastics skills for a quadrupled donation, so she vaults over a table of gifts but doesn’t stick the dismount and tumbles into a tree. Sober but clumsy, the tabloids are all over the “party heiress” yet again! It’s so hard to be Ellen Langford, daughter of Home & Hearth Gifts magnate, uh, Dad Langford! Dad’s disappointed that she did cool stunts instead of being boring, so he assigns her a cryptic task: hand-deliver a Christmas card to his erstwhile business partner, Zeke, in his hometown of Snow Falls.

She boards a bus, a fun new experience for her, with only a crisp benjamin to her name – which she isn’t using at the moment, because I guess she’s just so famous a celeb that she needs to be incognito, you know, a regular old person who can’t figure out why nobody will bring her a vodka and cranberry on this Greyhound. She gets to town and asks at the hotel where she can find Zeke. Nobody knows, but then the plot kicks up a snowstorm and she’s stranded in Snow Falls! This gives her plenty of time to make friends with the handsome innkeep and work out a deal so she can stay rent-free if she helps with the housekeeping. Good deal for someone who has never cleaned!

The whole town of Snow Falls is well-equipped to handle a snowstorm, though, and after Ellen (going by Ellie – GREAT disguise!) and the handsome innkeep go walking through a winter wonderland, where he shows her all the neat ice sculptures he makes! The town all rallies together to help each other out. Ellen lends her fundraising expertise by sourcing items for the charity auction in one afternoon by going around town and rolling really high Persuasion checks with every shop owner. (Hey, nonprofit development staff – forget targeted campaigns and long term strategic partner planning! Just go pop in unannounced at local Mom ‘n’ Pop stores until they fork over several hundred dollars’ worth of items!)

But then her City Slicker Boyfriend shows up (“Guess the roads are clear now!”) and makes trouble with her innkeep/love interest, blowing her cover. The handsome innkeep feels betrayed! Ellen still needs to find Zeke, but he’s conveniently hidden away in a big pile of plot for the moment, and Ellen decides to read through a box of letters between her dad and Zeke. They’re kind and sentimental, which is nice to see. The City Boyfriend reminds Ellen they can leave now and fly to Hawaii for Christmas like they planned. But Zeke’s not around and the handsome innkeep, still angry, refuses to deliver the letters for her. So she leaves with City Boyfriend, but feels bad, and when they stop for gas, she gives him back her engagement ring and boards the bus (now she’s a pro!) back to Snow Falls, just in time for the community Christmas Eve party where Zeke is dressed as Santa! Finally! She’s able to complete her quest and even gets to dance with handsome innkeep (guess he’s not mad anymore!). Now she can get that big money! Thank god, it was too idyllic helping out these randos with their snow task, we need that big capitalism back here stat.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 3/5 elf ears. Sometimes “whimsy” means “cartwheel into a tree” and sometimes it means “you just really have to pretend you don’t know how in-kind donations work”.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨✨ 4/5 twinkly lights. Snow Falls is pretty cute.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 5/5 faceplants. Can she nail the floor routine? Yes! Five out of five from the Russian judges!
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Yeah, it’s gotta be Christmas for this plot to work. Snowed in on Flag Day? Nah.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔🔔 2/5 silver bells. There’s a mention of “Silent Night” and they sing it a couple times for plot reasons so let’s give them a couple points for that.
REASON FOR SEASON: Getting rich by pretending you’re poor! 🤸‍♀️💰

CW: childhood bullying, ostensible orphans?

Once upon a childhood, four to five brothers (hard to discern) all approximately the Age of Peak Nostalgia (11?) live with their loving parents somewhere in the Connecticut Alps. Our narrator reflects (a la A Christmas Story) on his wonderful family that does all kinds of cool stuff together – they have a pirate ship treehouse out back, and at Christmas, their fun mom leads them in stealthy “elving” excursions, wherein they repeatedly shower gifts anonymously upon a local family of their choosing. This year, Mom chooses the family of the worst bully at school, the dreaded Hagbarts who live in a small lean-to on the edge of town. Matthew, the main brother, is understandably distressed to have to waste all of his Christmas goodwill on the kid who stole his sled, hoisted him into a trashcan and beats him up whenever he gets the chance. This being the 1980s, Matthew knows his parents won’t care enough to help, so he resigns himself to his victimhood and “elving” his abuser.

Meanwhile, the annual race to swipe the Christmas catalog right out of the mailman’s hands is underway. Whoever gets their mitts on the catalog first gets the best presents, because that is how catalogs (and healthy family dynamics) work! But the catalog remains elusive this year, which is a source of increasing stress for Matthew. He’s clearly dealing with a lot already. Add to that list the affections of Juniper, the girl he likes enough to break his Dad’s “no girls allowed” rule and bring to the family pirate treehouse. They eat snacks and talk about their future aspirations in some appropriate 11-year-old interactions.

The next morning, the treehouse has been tossed and vandalized, and Matthew confesses he broke his solemn vow for a little comfort and joy and everyone thinks Juniper’s a narc! Everyone’s pissed but they continue with the elving and deliver a shitty graham cracker gingerbread house to the Hagbarts’ front door, ringing the doorbell and fleeing to some nearby bushes to spy on their reaction. All the kids answer the door, and Matthew, peeking out from his hydrangea, sees that Finn the Bully appears to be the one responsible for taking care of the family. That’s why he’s so mean! He’s tired of adult responsibilities and his coping mechanism includes inflicting violence upon other children! Sympathetic character! Matthew just immediately Gets It. Back home he decides that he’s going to give all his presents to the Hagbarts, and his three or four brothers all join him after realizing that bad people are bad for good reasons, and that giving them presents in lieu of household stability is sure to help fix all that! (I think Matthew just wanted to buy himself some protection from the constant ass-whoopings Finn doles out, which is just how it worked in the golden age of 1980s childhood.)

Anyway, the Hagbarts eventually learn that the brothers are responsible for all their cool new stuff and Finn gives back the stolen sled now that he has a brand new one that’s way cooler. Matthew accepts this with a smile, because he is a victim and has learned to walk on eggshells around his abuser. Oh, and who stole the catalog anyway? It was the fifth brother! Who wasn’t actually a brother, but a nerdy friend, who just wanted a friend. Good news kid, you can have a whole family of friends if you want, it’s not like the mom knows how many of them there are. She’s already prego with a daughter! Pray for no sequels, I can’t handle another installment of this garbage.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. Boyhood hijinks, “elving”, goofy “Malcolm in the Middle” energy.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights, for the majestic, rugged Canadian wilderness that so closely resembles New England.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. Kids aren’t.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Surely they don’t go “elving” at other holidays.
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. Is this category even worth it? I never even notice the music unless it’s egregious.
REASON FOR SEASON: Forgiving your bully, because your parents won’t back you up! 🙎‍♂️

Arriving just in time to beat the looming winter storm, a shitty, rude white family arrives at the snowy vacation cabin their dad had built for them, and they are not that impressed. The mom thought it’d be a little cozier (“It’s just so…grand!”), and two teenagers groan about the lack of wifi and Dad’s no-electronics rule for the week. (“It’s Christmas! Just…talk to each other!” says the guy who ten minutes ago called his 16-year-old daughter an idiot). The Spunky Kid Sister, however, is all about the cabin, the winter storm, the holiday cheer, all of it, and gets to work trying to spread her glad tidings to her unhappy family when she overhears her parents fighting. (The wife is, I guess for the first time, telling her husband that she feels unloved and left alone while the husband is busy with his Business at all times and he never pays attention to her and hang on, honey, it’s Ben again, he’s on the line with the Japanese. It’s morning there, honey, I don’t control the time zones, I have to take this.) So the Kid Sister, chewing the scenery like a real Disney Channel Original supporting child actress, makes a desperate, tearful plea to the heavens: please don’t let my parents divorce!

The next morning, the Montgomery family’s awakened by an insistent pounding on the front door. Dad picks up the tablet on the nightstand and sees, via wifi-enabled porch camera, a Black family bundled up and shivering on their doorstep! Here’s where it gets super unrealistic: they let the family in and welcome them into their warm cabin and give them clothes to change into after the newcomers’ trek through the snowstorm trying to find help after their car got stuck. Yeah! I guess they don’t see race? The dysfunctional family is blown away by the love and kindness of their New Black Friends, the Tuckers, whose son is the teen daughter’s age and whose daughter is the teen son’s age. (The Kid stands alone, which is fine, since she’s got her hands full serving as both the narrator AND the Greek chorus.) The kids all set about making popcorn-cranberry strands and pretty soon the house is just festooned with all manner of garlands and ornaments. Cookies get made, feelings get shared, and you realize SUPER quick that something’s up with this family. (I would have so loved an “Us” spin here, but no luck.) When Mrs. Montgomery asks Mrs. Tucker what she does for a living, Mrs. Montgomery uses the past tense to answer, and doesn’t clarify when Mrs. Tucker questions it. Do you get it yet? Surprise, they’re ghosts! They don’t intend the reveal to happen this early, but this a is deeply unskillful clue-drop, so even if you’ve fallen asleep by now you’re gonna pick it up.

Anyway, the Tuckers seamlessly enter their lives and make the holidays joyful with all their good qualities and absence of personalities, and the Kid provides lots of unsolicited details about their family stuff, like that they had a 4th kid but she died. Business Dad is still doing too much Business Texting, so Mom tells him she’s leaving with the kids as soon as the Tuckers leave. That night, the winter storm returns fiercely (it takes BOTH dads to hold the door shut from the wind!) and knocks out the power. The backup generator doesn’t work, and Dad pitches a wee tantrum while everyone else just gets excited about pulling their sleeping bags up to the fire. While everyone sleeps, Dad’s too tormented to relax, so he decides to go brave the elements to go out to the car to retrieve the only extant photo of him with his dead child. Bad idea – the snow is blowing at 7493 kph and an unstable spruce tree falls on him, pinning him to the ground and knocking him out.

His son finds him passed out under a tree in the morning, and Erstwhile Nurse Tucker stabilizes him (“people can be unconscious for a long time and recover just fine!” she lies to the son) until he wakes up. His blizzard encounter was apparently a real Come to Treesus moment because he’s suddenly invested in his family instead of Business Texting. The Tuckers were going to leave today, on Christmas Eve, like, to MOVE ON, but a little dad tete-a-tete convinces the Tuckers to stick around one more day. The power comes back on, everyone has the most wonderful Christmas, and they bid adieu to the Tuckers the next day. An hour after they’ve left (to trek back to their car), Dad Montgomery decides in a dadly fashion that he should “go check on them”. Everyone piles in the car and they head out to the road, only to discover a small memorial with some mourners gathered around. What’s this? Apparently the beloved Tucker family DIED THREE DAYS AGO IN A CAR WRECK. Like, yeah, no shit. The teen daughter realizes that the selfie she took with Tucker Kid ONLY SHOWS HER and back at the house they discover there were only three snow angels instead of five! What a wonderful Christmas they had with four kind ghosts! They sure learned some lessons!

This movie’s cast is almost half Black, but the viewing experience might as well have a Whites Only sign on it. Four Black people died, and had to spend their first days in the afterlife giving emotional support to a family of crappy, affluent white people. It’s not clear why they didn’t just go straight to heaven or whatever, but the movie doesn’t ask us to consider what unfinished business a Black family might have that could be resolved by helping yet another white family work through their stupid baggage. Because it’s not important! What’s important is that these white people are now BETTER because some Black folks helped them become less awful people. And if that’s not a grim enough thought, consider this one: this movie first aired in 2015, two years after Renisha McBride was murdered for the crime of knocking on a white man’s door for help after getting in a car accident. It gives no hints or chin-nods of understanding to the viewers that such a situation can be a potentially dangerous situation for people of color. I hate this and so should you.

WHIMSY: 🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️🧝‍♂️ 4/5 elf ears. The Kid provides most of the whimsy. The ghostly/racial implications don’t qualify as “whimsical”.
SPARKLE FACTOR: ✨✨✨ 3/5 twinkly lights for the high-quality resourceful decorations the kids put up. They decked them halls good.
ADORKABILITY: 🙃🚫 0/5 faceplants. Again, kids aren’t adorkable, they’re just kids.
CHRISTMAS SCALE: 🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅 5/5 Santa hats. Nothing like Christmas to have some ghosts teach you what’s what!
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR: 🔔 1/5 silver bells. Again, there was very likely music, but I guess it’s just never something I really commit to memory unless it’s especially heinous.
REASON FOR SEASON: The unpaid labor that POCs do to give white folks a better quality of life! 💁🏿‍♀️