Christmas In Pine Valley | 2022 Christmas Movies

When I first starting writing these Christmas reviews so long ago, I decided that the MarVisa Entertainment production company was my nemesis. They make a lot of awful Christmas movies. I hadn’t noticed their company logo lately so I thought maybe they gave up. I was wrong. Their movies are still bad but either they aren’t as bad as they used to be or I have grown more tolerant of them. I hope it’s not the latter.

Natalie (Kristina Cole) runs a family Christmas tree farm/home goods store. When she lands a large order from Mr. Prentice (John McKerrow), she is forced to pretend that the company is owned by blood relations or she risks losing the order. In addition, magazine journalist Josh (Andrew Biernat) wants to write an extremely truthful article on the company. Can Natalie and the gang pull off pretending to be a real family instead of a chosen family?

Christmas In Pine Valley is, and I am not kidding about this, the stupidest Christmas movie I have seen this season. Mr. Prentice insists on only buying from family-run companies. He admits that he cancels orders if he finds out the companies are not run by actual family members. Then he places an order for 500(!) pieces of their soap, candles, handmade wooden ornaments, and essential oils. Does he really think a small family-run company has the capacity to make 500 pieces of product in just a few days? Or that their company wouldn’t be completely ruined if he cancelled the order after they already started production? Yet at no point is he made out to be the villain in the story.

In addition, we have stupid Josh. He randomly shows up on their doorstep without calling ahead to schedule a time to talk to the family about his article. Then he follows them around, even after they tell him how busy they are. And he has the gall to tell Natalie that he’ll write a bad article if he finds out that they aren’t a family?

Apparently none of these people know about branding. They straight up say the farm was started in 1937. The people that originally owned that farm would either be very elderly or dead in 2022. Even if they left the farm to their children and those children left the farm to their children, they would need more than only their relatives to run the farm. It’s unreasonable to think that everyone in a company with “Family” in the name are actual blood family members.

Absolutely do not watch Christmas In Pine Valley. As a matter of fact, don’t watch anything from MarVista Entertainment. I think I might boycott them again.

Christmas Sweethearts | 2022 Christmas Movies

I think I get it now. The former CEO of Hallmark didn’t leave the channel because he thought “The Gays” were taking over. It was because people actually acted like they enjoyed being around each other. I think all of the movies I have watched on Great American Family, so far, have consisted of couples that didn’t even like being in the same room as each other. It explains a lot.

Ashley (Breanne Hill), a party planner living in Los Angeles, has come home for the holidays. When she finds out that her high school sweetheart, Grant (Tanner Novlan), is dating popular influencer Bella Vega (Masiela Lusha), she decides to pretend to date her friend and co-worker, Liam (Colton Little), in order to make him jealous. Things go awry when Ashley finally gets what she thought she wanted.

Sometimes the jealousy plotline works well. But it only works when all of the people involved like each other. There are some longing looks from Grant towards Ashley and we’re supposed to gather from the very beginning that Liam is in love with Ashley but it’s difficult to see either of the men actually wanting to date her. She comes off as very self-centered, especially since her entire plan is to break up a current couple. The only person I feel bad for in this movie is Bella. She didn’t do a single thing wrong except for maybe be a little on the dumb side.

My vote is to stay away from Christmas Sweethearts. I’m sure there will be another, better, jealousy Christmas movie this year. This one is just bad.

A Merry Christmas Wish | 2022 Christmas Movies

I know I harp on the stupid titles that some of these Christmas movies have. And I know that there is a limit to what they could name them. After all, all of the movies need to have something holiday related in the title, right? With a title like A Merry Christmas Wish, you would think it had something to do with wishes in some way. Nope. There is no wishing here. This should have been called A Merry Christmas Inheritance or Winter Wonderland Down On The Farm or something like that. This title gets a -100 out of 100 from me.

Janie (Jill Wagner) is a New York marketing executive. Recently, her great-uncle passed, leaving her the family farm and a letter. In the letter, he asks her to hold the farm’s Winter Wonderland festival one last time before selling the property. With the help of her childhood friend, Dylan (Cameron Mathison), she not only holds the festival but falls back in love with the farm and the town.

For once, I don’t know what to say about a movie. Usually there’s something I can was nice or was terrible but this one just was. As a matter of fact, the only memorable scene in this entire movie was a kid saying the cookies she made sucked and the face Janie made when she bit into one. Indeed, the cookies did suck. So they had to have a whole new scene where they were making completely different cookies. I guess that makes it two memorable scenes…

You can watch A Merry Christmas Wish if you really want to but be warned that you already know what will happen. This movie is extremely predictable and boring. Even the big conflicts in it are boring. If the writers had made any of the side characters at least a little unlikeable, that would have made it slightly more interesting. But nope, everyone is just fine. I kinda hate it.

Love At The Christmas Contest | 2022 Christmas Movies

Is it me or does there seem like there is a lot more death in this year’s Christmas movies? We don’t really need to be giving everyone dead parent trauma in order to make someone a single parent. Divorce is a thing, you know.

This is the first Christmas Angie (Samantha Cope) is celebrating without her mother. She enters a Christmas tree decorating contest to honor her mother’s memory. Also entering the contest is David (Ross Jirgl), Angie’s recently-widowed high school sweetheart, and his daughter, Gabby (Eliza Donaghy). Will all three of them be able to find the Christmas spirit again?

Love At The Christmas Contest was so boring. The whole plot centered around this tree decorating contest but we didn’t actually see any tree decorating. They talked about it. Awards were given. But we didn’t even get a montage of people decorating their trees. It would have been great to see Angie and her friend, Blair (Triana Browne), decorating their bee tree and giggling while David helped Gabby decorate their tree. There was so much potential lost there.

And I’m really over all of the death. We haven’t even reached the middle of November yet and it feels like everyone’s parents or wives have died. I guess that is this year’s theme. Death. Maybe it’s the networks’ way of sorta addressing the pandemic without actually addressing it. No one ever gives a reason why their loved one has died. They are just gone. If that this what is going on, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the Christmas movie season. We still have a lot to go.

Sadly, I can’t recommend watching Love At The Christmas Contest. It is sad and boring. I never thought I would see a move that actually made me want more montages. What the heck, Great American Family?

A Royal Christmas On Ice | 2022 Christmas Movies

Sometimes I’m not sure where ideas for these movies come from. There aren’t a ton of Christmas movies that revolve around ice skating but there are a ton about royalty. I guess they thought that the two would be good together? Let’s look at A Royal Christmas On Ice from Great American Family channel.

Abigail (Anna Marie Dobbins) was a figure skating Olympic hopeful. When an injury dashed her dreams of Olympic gold, she began teaching ice skating in her hometown in upstate New York. Prince John (Jonathan Stoddard) is the last in line for the throne. He wants something that would be his so he decides to buy an ice hockey team. He travels to the United States to look for the perfect venue to house his new team. It turns out to be the same venue where Abigail runs her classes. Can Abigail save her school or will she lose it along with her heart?

I don’t understand this movie. My biggest problem - why can’t they both use the venue? Are we supposed to think that Abigail’s skating classes take up an entire day or the hockey team uses the rink all day? There’s a ECHL professional hockey team that plays near my house and their venue holds giant music concerts during the hockey season. It’s not like the venue is completely shut down for them. This is a conflict that doesn’t exist in real life.

Second, Abigail refuses to use her name or face to advertise her classes. She’s embarrassed about getting injured during the Olympics. (Or maybe it’s the Olympic trials? I’m not sure.) I can see this both ways. On one hand, I can see feeling like a failure and who would want to take classes from a failure. A Royal Christmas On Ice should have had a few random people come up to her while she was around town and be like “Oh my god! Aren’t you Abigail the ice skater?” or something. Something that would have shown us that people still remember her. Because, on the other hand, once she puts her face on that flyer, her event sells out within days. We don’t get any sort of sense of how popular she really is with the public.

The royalty part doesn’t confuse me as much. I can understand why someone who doesn’t have a lot of royal responsibilities would want a little something for themselves. Maybe if they had shown John slacking in his royal duties that the hockey thing would have been more scandalous. As it stands, the poor guy just wants something to do.

A Royal Christmas On Ice was actually a decent movie. As with other GAC movies, this isn’t going to make a Best Of list but I enjoyed watching it. it did feel a little bit like a fanfic written by a teenage girl, which doesn’t make it terrible. It makes it feel a little like a throwback to those times.

Catering Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

One of the things that annoyed me during the Hallmark Channel Christmas movies were all of the commercial bumps featuring Candace Cameron Bure. You know, those are the things where she’s like “Join me for the best Christmas season at Hallmark!” or some sugar-coated saying. Well, now that she’s jumped to Great American Family, she still gets the commercial bumps but now they feel like digs at the Hallmark Channel. “You’ve found me at my NEW home!” Ugh. Go away, Candace.

Molly (Merritt Patterson) owns a catering business that keeps losing jobs to her competition. When she wins the chance to cater the annual Harrison Christmas charity gala, she puts her all into impressing her client. Meanwhile, Jean Harrison (Rosemary Dunsmore) is trying to convince her nephew, Carson (Daniel Lissing), to settle down and take over running the charity foundation. Jean puts Carson in charge of overseeing the catering, which means Molly and Carson spend more time together. Will Molly make Carson want to give up his traveling photography job and settle down in New Hampshire?

With Catering Christmas, Great American Family channel seems to be trying to put both Lifetime and Hallmark out of the Christmas movie business. I actually had a pretty good time watching it. Sure, there were some slow parts that had me reaching for my phone for some games but, overall, I enjoyed it. Patterson and Lissing had some decent chemistry. They seemed to enjoy sharing the screen, even if they didn’t always seem like they were attracted to each other. Let’s just say they are on the higher end of the Christmas Movie Couple Ranking. They’re just not quite at the top yet.

If you have access to the Great American Family channel, give some time to Catering Christmas. Even if you only subscribe to one of the streaming networks hosting the channel for a few months through the Christmas season, I think it might be worth the few bucks for it. Now if only there was somewhere I could buy Carson’s photography prints for myself….

Destined At Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Destined At Christmas is my first jump into Christmas movies from the Great American Family channel. This is the channel that Candace Cameron Bure and Danica McKellar left Hallmark for. This is also the channel run by the former CEO of Hallmark who didn’t like Hallmark including LGBTQ+ people in their programming. I’m not sure exactly what to expect but my expectations aren’t high.

Kim (Shae Robins) and Theo (Casey Elliott) meet while shopping on Black Friday. The two hit it off but lose touch after getting separated during a power outage. For the next month, they try to find each other. Close calls and misunderstandings abound until they are finally able to reconnect.

To be honest, I was expecting some sort of “God will work things out” message. That never happened. Instead, it was two people trying to find each other with the limited information they had. Granted, the whole movie could have been avoided if Theo just called out for Kim when he left the store. She called out for him but since she left first, he didn’t hear her. And there were a couple of weird places where they asked for the personal information of the other person. Why would a random store give out the contact information for one of their customers to a random person walking in off the street? For the sake of The Plot, I will give them a pass.

Surprisingly, I actually liked Destined At Christmas. Sure, it was a little cheesy but the acting wasn’t awful and the script was pretty decent. It would have been better if they had ditched the two potential love interested for Kim and Theo since they had zero influence on the main plot. However, I do understand what they were going for.

Destined At Christmas most likely isn’t going to make it to my list of top Christmas movies this year. That doesn’t mean it was a waste of time to watch. Grab a really good cup of hot chocolate and maybe your cell phone for the slower parts. I don’t think you’ll regret watching it.