Once again, Lifetime is letting me down. Can’t they at least come up with a good title? Or change the script to make the title a little more relevant? It’s getting ridiculous.

As a child, Phoebe (Beverley Mitchell) and her best friend, Laurie (Benedicte Belizaire), went to Candy Cane Lane - a Christmas light display put on by people in their neighborhood. This year, the neighbors have decided to skip the display. Disappointed, Phoebe tries to find new traditions to fill her Christmas season.

For the record, this movie has nothing to do with candy canes. I don’t even know why they named the light display Candy Cane Lane. From what I could tell, it was mostly a drive-through thing with Santa at the end. There wasn’t anything particularly special or magical that would make a child swear to visit every year for the rest of their life.

That brings us to Phoebe, who spends most of the movie whining about the loss of the display. When she agrees to try to find new things to fill her boring Christmas life, her big things are: a toy drive for foster children and teaching senior citizens how to make wreaths. Neither of those are really traditions, nor do they take up a ton of time. Then again, I’m not sure how much time she spent helping with the light display because we never see her working on it, only talking about how much she loves it. She talks a lot.

The love interest, Eric (Mark Ghanimé), isn’t any better. He says “I didn’t think about that” a lot. It’s like his entire personality revolves around him and his aunt. Anything beyond that doesn’t occur to him. Considering this guy is supposed to be a veterinarian, you would think that he would be a little more thoughtful of the people around him.

I tried really hard to like Candy Cane Christmas. I spent way too much time trying to figure out why characters were doing what they were doing. The payoff wasn’t worth it. Skip this movie. Go to a drive-through Christmas light display instead. Maybe that will give you some Christmas cheer. Because this won’t.

As a pagan, I have been fairly comfortable with the amount of Christianity in these Christmas romance movies. While they’ve all revolved around the holiday season, none of them have actually gone into the religion around it. I guess there is a first time for everything.

Hometown Christmas is about Noelle (Beverley Mitchell) moving home to Louisiana from Chicago. She decides to bring back her late mother’s tradition of a live nativity on Christmas. Add in a former boyfriend from high school and that is the entire plot of the movie.

I don’t want to rag on the religious aspect of the movie, even though it is very heavy handed. Unfortunately, that is all there is here. The ‘conflict’ between Noelle and her ex-boyfriend, Nick (Stephen Colletti), feels forced. He’s not mad at her but she is mad at him for no real reason. And her anger doesn’t feel real. It all feels fake, which is terrible for a movie that is desperately trying to push the Christian story. The conflict is fake, the whole purpose of the nativity feels empty, even Noelle’s brother’s relationship doesn’t feel real. It literally feels like this is a group of people reading a script that was just handed to them. It would probably be more believable if they were standing around reading scripts!

Sadly, there isn’t anything good here. The nativity scene ends with Noelle singing “O Holy Night,” but Mitchell is a TERRIBLE singer. Please, stay far away from Hometown. You’ll thank me for saving you two hours.