There are Christmas movies that are about romance during the holiday season. Then there are movies that are about Christmas spirit that happen to have romance in them. Lifetime’s Christmas Unwrapped is the latter.

Erik Gallagher (Marco Grazzini) runs a charity that gives away millions of dollars in presents every year. Charity (Amber Stevens West) is a reporter assigned to write an article about Erik, specifically where he gets the money to support the annual event.

Christmas Unwrapped is a little like a dollar store Elf. Where Elf’s Buddy was a human raised by Santa and his elves, Unwrapped’s Erik was a foster child tasked by Kris Kringle to help distribute cheer (and gifts) at Christmas. Of course, you have the unbelieving humans (Elf has Jovie, Unwrapped has Charity) that not only end up believing in Santa at the end - they also fall in love with their male counterpart.

Sadly, Unwrapped isn’t as fun as Elf. The pacing is a little slow at times and the big conflict in the third act could have easily been avoided if Charity just told Erik what was going on instead of letting him find out…and assume the worst…on his own. There’s also a secondary love story between Charity’s friend, Tisha (Cherion Drakes), and Erik’s friend, Aaron (Morgan Kelly), that doesn’t ever get resolved. We get some longing glances between them and that’s it. It would have been nice to see the two of them at some of the Christmas events kindling their own romance.

But just because the movie isn’t as good as Elf doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a watch. The acting is decent, the plot is OK, even the expected twist was pulled off fairly well. Give it a go and let me know what you think about it. I’d like to hear if you liked this one as well.