Time For Her To Come Home For Christmas | 2023 Christmas Movies

With Time For Her To Come Home For Christmas, I think they have finally run out of pronouns to come home. I have watched Time For Us, Time For Them, and Time For Him. Will this be the end of Blake Shelton’s Christmas movies?

Carly (Shenae Grimes-Beech) is a musician who has been hired to help a church choir prepare for their Christmas concert.

Yeah, that is pretty much the plot. All summed up in one line. And that is how deep this movie is as well. We get a schmaltzy story about Carly’s mother passing and love-interest Matthew (Chris Carmack) returning from some soldiery duty. But that is it. Everything that should be deep and emotional feels flat and cardboardy. Handled correctly, this could have been an amazing story about someone finding lost family and finding where they belong. Instead, it was about a rather terrible song about Christmas.

Rating: Can the next one be “Time For Me To Leave?”

Spotlight on Christmas | 2020 Christmas Movies

We’re getting close to Christmas but there are still so many Christmas movies to get through. I think Lifetime is beating out Hallmark for the sheer number of Christmas movies they are airing this season. Spotlight on Christmas is another one of their offerings.

Olivia O’Hara (Tori Anderson) is a famous Hollywood actress. When her boyfriend, country singer Ryan Wrangler (Matthew James Dowden), breaks up with her right before Christmas, Olivia goes back home to get her life back together.

Usually, when a Christmas movie character is an actress, she’s a stuck up bitch, expecting the world to stop for her. Olivia, however, is a down-to-earth person that just wants to escape the paparazzi. She’s a little heartbroken and needs her family around her.

Early on, she meets Casey (Victor Zinck Jr), a high school classmate that is now teaching at their alma mater. It brings up another interesting twist that we don’t normally see in these movies. The high school needs a drama teacher so the kids can put on their annual Christmas Eve play. Olivia steps up to help the kids. I loved that they gave Olivia something to do beyond hanging out at home or wandering around town.

Spotlight on Christmas was pretty good. You can go ahead and watch this one. Then make sure you grab a chocolate mint milkshake. They sound amazing!

Operation Christmas Drop | 2020 Christmas Movies

After binging so many Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies, I took a break and switched over to Netflix. One of their first releases for 2020 is Operation Christmas Drop.

When Congresswoman Bradford (Virginia Madsen) sees an article about an Air Force base’s humanitarian mission called Operation Christmas Drop, along with a picture of a shirtless airman with a ukulele, she sends her aide, Erica (Kat Graham), to the Guam base for a budgetary analysis. Captain Andrew Jantz (Alexander Ludwig) is assigned to show Erica the ins and outs of the operation.

There is a lot to unpack with this movie. I know that there needs to be a heartless villain that wants to ruin The Good Thing but I’m pretty sure one of the purposes of US military bases is to provide support to locals. In this case, it would be local islands that don’t have access to necessities. So I don’t think that a congressperson would make a decision to close a base based solely on one annual supply drop. It is a good backdrop for a movie, however, and it does shine light on the good things the US military does.

In case you weren’t aware, Operation Christmas Drop is an actual Air Force tradition that began in 1952. (If you stay tuned after the movie, there are some real life facts about the mission.) And while Erica and Andrew are fictional characters, we do get to see Brother Bruce played by himself. I appreciated seeing someone who participates in the annual event in the movie.

Is Operation Christmas Drop worth watching? Well, it’s not as cheesy as the Hallmark/Lifetime fare. And there are some really pretty locations. But there isn’t a lot of substance. It’s OK, just not great.