Well, that was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I don’t think I understand how Lifetime chooses what movies to air. Do they just pick the ones that sound the most Christmassy?

Erin (Stephanie Bennett) is a widow with two young daughters. When her mother goes on a Christmas cruise, she decides to spend the holidays with her estranged father, Gary (Brent Stait). There she meets a local Mexican restaurant owner, Mateo (Marco Grazzini).

Lonestar Christmas isn’t really a romance Christmas movie. Yes, there is romance in it but it’s really about a woman that is emotionally broken. She has a lot of anger towards her father from him not being around when she was a child. Granted, it sounds like maybe he was going to college or something. They don’t really explain why or how he wasn’t around. Everyone just says he wasn’t around. In addition, I’m not sure she has truly grieved her dead husband. Since she has two young children, she admitted that she focused on raising them instead of dealing with her emotions. Erin needs to go see a therapist immediately.

I don’t have anything against a movie about a woman working through her emotional trauma. That might actually make a good Christmas movie since a lot of people have troubles around the holidays. If they took out Erin’s patient, Tessa (BJ Harrison), and replaced her with an actual therapist, it would have changed the mood of the movie. Erin (who is an occupational therapist) already uses Tessa as a sort of therapist, which is a terrible idea since she is one of Erin’s PATIENTS. She is not a friend, she is not a confidant, she is a patient. They should have had Erin talking to a professional to deal with her problems.

Should you watch Lonestar Christmas? I would say skip it unless you want to watch a woman devolve into self-pity. I really wish they had treated this differently so I could recommend it.