When I saw the title for Record Breaking Christmas, I assumed we were going to have another movie about a singer. Nope. This one is about world records, like The Guinness Book Of World Records.

Leah (Michelle Argyris) is an adjudicator for the World Records Bureau who specializes in judging Christmas record attempts. A nearby small town is attempting to break six world records. Leah and her trainee, Jin (Danny Vo), travel Saint Drexel to validate whether not the records have been broken.

Record Breaking Christmas was a cute movie. Argyris may be one of my favorite Christmas movie leading ladies, even if she isn’t always in the best movies. She has a way of making her characters relatable without making them annoying. I think the leading man, Andrew Bushell, usually gets pushed to the friend category in Christmas movies but he held his own as the lead here.

While I’m going to file this one under “Watch,” I would have liked to see a little more of the record breaking attempts. We see a lot of them when they are already done and we don’t even see the results of others. (They just reference them in a throwaway line.) Since the records are the main plot of the movie, I would have liked to have seen the town working together more on the actual record attempts. The Hula Hoop one would have been a blast to see!

Jacky Lai from 2020’s A Sugar & Spice Holiday faces off with Christmas powerhouse Jake Epstein. Seriously, how does that guy have the time to film so many Christmas movies? Anyway, Candy Cane Candidate had a bit of genre change up going on. Get this…

Julia (Jacky Lai) lost her recent political campaign. To regain her emotional footing, she decides to go home for the holidays. She finds out that her old high school arch nemesis, Parker (Jake Epstein), is running for town mayor. UNOPPOSED! Julia thinks the town should have a choice so she decides to run against him. Will Julia win this time or will she lose again to Parker like she lost the class president election?

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a ton of romance in Candy Cane Candidate. Julia was pretty dead set on running her campaign and Parker wanted to make sure the town’s holiday traditions weren’t trampled all over. Sure, there were a few glances and some flirty moments but they didn’t make up the bulk of the movie. It felt like a bit of fresh air after all of the overt wooing in other movies.

If we want to talk about down sides, which don’t really need to do, I wish that Jacky would have done more about the ecological changes she wanted to make instead of just talking about them. The only thing she “did” was arrange a toy drive claiming that it was recycling plastic toys. It would have been nice to see her maybe making some phone calls to see what would be needed to fix the wonky lights at the high school. Even if she lost the election to Parker, she could have passed that information onto him to try to make it happen.

I do recommend watching Candy Cane Candidate. Even if you only watch it to see the Lai and Epstein Christmas Spectacular, you won’t regret it. They are both charismatic actors that I can’t wait to see more of in the future.