How many Christmas tropes can they fit into one movie? I think Lifetime’s A Very Charming Christmas Town is trying to hit every single trope possible.

Aubrey (Natalie Hall) is a former-songwriter-turned-blogger. She visits Danish-style town, Solvang, CA, to see if they really are the “Most Christmassy Town in the USA.” Even though she is a bit of a brat, Sawyer (Jon Prescott) takes on the challenge of showing the magic of Solvang.

OK. Let’s count off the tropes this movie crams in: A musician (check, she’s a somewhat famous songwriter), a blogger (check, she stopped writing songs to write lifestyle blog posts),a woman loving sugar (check, she practically drools at every cookie, candy, and pastry she sees), a business owner (check, this time it’s the male lead!)…I think maybe that covers all of them. Poor Aubrey really does feel like a checklist of characteristics instead of an actual person.

In case you didn’t know, Solvang is a real town in southern California. Usually these Christmas movies center around a fake town with a wintery/Christmas-sounding name. While I’m not positive the movie was actually filmed in Solvang, there were some nods to the town. At least that gave it a little dose of reality.

Uuugghh…I don’t know what to say about AVCCT. The characters were terrible cardboard cutouts (with the exception of Laurel played by Kelley Jakle), the plot sucked, the conflict was unbelievable, even the resolution was dull. The only good parts were Kelley Jakle’s singing and the town itself. So I guess do a slow fast forward (not the super speedy one!) so you can see the town and stop about ten minutes from the end so you can hear Jakle’s one song. That’s the best this movie will get.