So let me get this right - The Christmas Quest, a movie about an actual mystery, is on the main Hallmark Channel while A Dance In The Snow, a movie about an autistic girl and her mother, is on Hallmark Mystery. Make it make sense, Hallmark!

Jenny (Vanessa Burghardt) is an autistic high school senior. Her mother, Melanie (Erica Cerra), does everything she can to make Jenny’s life easier, including opening a center for autistic people. When the school’s winter dance rolls around, Jenny doesn’t want to go due to a bad experience the previous year. As a surprise for Jenny, Melanie, with some help from Jenny’s literature teacher Daniel (Mark Ghanimé), decides to join the dance planning committee in order to make the dance more accessible for everyone. Meanwhile, Jenny and her friends decide to plan their own winter dance as a surprise for Melanie. Love begins to bloom for both women but, thanks to the secrecy, their relationship falters a little.

This was a pretty sweet movie. It was nice to see an autistic actor (Burghardt) playing an autistic character. Usually the directors give some lame excuse about how difficult it is to find someone or work with them. A Dance In The Snow proves those excuses wrong.

With that said, I don’t know that this movie is for everyone. The plot does move pretty slowly and there isn’t a ton of action happening. However, it really is a nice break from the insanity that is the traditional Hallmark Christmas movie.

Rating: There’s no Christmas but there is snow

As I was poking around the web a bit, I found out that Sarah Drew voiced some of the characters in Daria, one of my favorite shows! I knew her from the early 2000s show, Everwood, and she has done a few other Christmas movies but I never knew about Daria. I think I might like her a bit more now.

MacKenzie (Sarah Drew) is a high school biology teacher and an EMT. After her firefighter father dies, she joins his former team to compete in the town’s big fundraiser - The Reindeer Games. This year, her high school crush, Chase (Justin Bruening), comes home from Hollywood to visit his pregnant sister. When he gets talked into joining a competing team, sparks begin to fly between the two.

I admit that I don’t always pay close attention to the opening credits of these Christmas movies. Most of the time the opening panning shots are awful and the credit font is either unreadable or ugly. But that means I completely missed the fact that Sarah Drew also wrote this movie. I don’t think that changes my opinion of it but it’s an interesting fact.

A lot of Christmas movies suffer from having nothing going on. Reindeer Games Homecoming has the opposite problem. There is a ton of stuff going on and some of the stuff gets kicked to side a bit. For example, Chase supposedly wants to nab this role in an action movie. But it only comes up as an excuse for something. He originally doesn’t want to join the team for the polar plunge because he’s afraid he’ll get sick and he really wants this movie role. The movie is filming in Prague so who knows what would happen if he gets into a relationship with MacKenzie. (Though, honestly, he thinks about that part the least.) Meanwhile, MacKenzie is still mourning her father while doing the morning crossword puzzle, teaching biology, moonlighting as an EMT, and also participating in the Reindeer Games. The movie wants us to believe that she loves crossword puzzles but we only see her doing two - one of which is a scavenger hunt at the end of the movie. I think Drew wanted to make the characters feel more three-dimensional but shoved too much in there for a 90-minute movie.

Despite the movie being chock full of nothing, it is still pretty fun to watch. The acting is decent and I really enjoyed watching Chase and MacKenzie complete in the Games. Go ahead and give it a watch. If nothing else, you’ll get to see Bruening jump into freezing cold water in his underwear. That is worth something, right?