A Fiancé for Christmas was so close to actually being a good movie. Why did they have to screw it up?

Sawyer (Amanda Payton) is an obstetrician who never has enough time to fit dating into her life. After watching everyone around get her married, she creates a fake wedding registry in the hopes it will make her feel better. Instead, her best friends find the registry and throw her a surprise engagement party. Too embarrassed to confess her secret, she enlists Landon (Adam Gregory), the brother of one of her patients, to pretend to be her fiancé. Soon the relationship becomes more than pretend.

At its core, this movie is so good. I have two giant problems though. One is Marie Osmond’s spastic acting as Sawyer’s mother. The other is, for some reason, they decided to make Sawyer very childish. Not only does she steal food off of other people’s plates, she also excitedly jumps around whenever anyone mentions cookies. In one scene, Landon says she can have a bite of his snowman cookie and she literally shoves the entire thing in her mouth. Who does that?! She also spends a lot of time pouting or pretend crying when things don’t go her way. If they had made her an actual adult instead of an overgrown child, I probably would have liked the movie much better. Remember, this child-woman is supposed to be a doctor!

The sad thing is that I enjoyed the parts where Sawyer and Landon were having fun and going on the pretend dates. But it is extremely difficult to overlook everything else. Sawyer has an unhealthy obsession with food. Everyone else jokes about it but it isn’t funny. I would bet that it’s triggering to anyone suffering from an eating disorder. THAT is how obsessed she is with food. (Side note: Her cat’s name is Tater Tot and she adopts another cat and names him Cannoli.)

I don’t know that I can recommend A Fiancé for Christmas. I want to but it feels irresponsible. My recommendation is to try to read some other reviews and make a decision after reading what other people think. I hope I’m not the only one that has issues with the movie.

Lifetime finally gives us a movie that is a little more realistic. At least in the romance department.

Jackie (Carly Hughes) is a newspaper reporter in San Diego. When her newspaper is bought by Melanie (Marie Osmond), Jackie takes an opportunity to run a small local newspaper in Alaska. The owner of the newspaper, Finn (Rob Mayes), and the town embrace Jackie, showing her what Christmas is really about.

Yes, the newspaper part of the movie is rather thin. Jackie wants to be an editor-in-chief but her only experience is writing mostly fluff articles and having a dad that was a successful reporter? While I understand why she is upset that Melanie wants to bump her back down to Staff Reporter, she should have known it was going to happen. Especially since Melanie’s company is digital-only. They can use a few editors-in-chief to cover all of their brands instead of one for each paper.

As for the newspaper in Alaska, I’m not sure how that was running at all. When Jackie arrives, the only staff are Dolores (Emily Alabi) the photographer and Edna (Aloma Wright) who runs the printing press. Who writes the articles? Finn’s dad wrote for it before he died but that was awhile ago. The paper should have shut down long before Jackie got there.

The only part of the movie that I liked was how the relationship between Jackie and Finn progressed. Instead of suddenly falling in love, the couple spends a lot of time together at the various Christmas events in town. It was a nice change from the slew of Christmas movies where the leads hate each other until the very end when they kiss. The Christmas Edition had quite a few almost kisses that got interrupted, making their relationship a little more believable.

If you are watching these Christmas movies for the romance, this is a good movie to watch. However, if you are looking for something more, this might not be the movie for you.