How To Fall In Love By Christmas | 2023 Christmas Movies

It would be great if Christmas movies would actually decide on a title. Roku’s How To Fall In Love By Christmas is also listed as How To Fall In Love By The Holidays, depending on where you look. It makes it difficult to actually find the title when you want to watch it. Especially when there are other movies with a similar title.

Nora Winters (Teri Hatcher) is the CEO of a lifestyle magazine. When the reader numbers start dropping, the board of directors partners with a dating app to try to win over younger readers. They insist that Nora, herself, use the app and write a column documenting her journey to love. To help get the younger demographic, they hire photographer Jack (Dan Payne) to take pictures along the way.

We have seen this storyline before. A newspaper or magazine writer has to write an article or column about falling in love around the holidays. But they can’t just write about it, that would be dishonest. No, they have to actually fall in love. That isn’t usually how the writing world works but whatever. It’s supposed to be interesting. (I don’t think it is.)

What is interesting here, though, isn’t the tired romance storyline. It’s the B plot with Nora’s sister, Adley (Rachel Wilson), running their late mother’s bakery and charity almost entirely by herself. I would love to have a movie that showed her story. Sure, she’s already married with a kid so she doesn’t need that romance plot. Or does she? How wonderful would it be to show how a woman running a business and a charity included her husband in her life? It wouldn’t be about just appeasing him. It would be about how they work together to keep everything running while the “successful” sister runs off to take care of whatever she thinks is important. That would have been so much more interesting.

Rating: A tired and overused 10-step program

'Twas The Night Before Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movie

When I read the title ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, this is not what I expected from it. I try not to expect anything from Christmas movies but I thought this would be like a performance of the story or something. It’s not.

Madison (Torrey DeVitto) is an actress who wants to become a director. Her first attempt at directing is a local courtroom play debating who wrote ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. Was it Major Henry Livingston Jr (Richard Waugh) or Clement Clarke Moore (Shaun Austin-Olsen)?

Hm. This movie wanted to be so much more than it was. It wanted us to care about the lead couple, Madison and Connor (Zane Holtz) but it didn’t give us enough to make us want to care about them. It wanted us to either love or hate the terrible lead actress in the play, Lena (Sophie Bastelle) but there wasn’t enough to feel strongly about her either way. It wanted us to care about who wrote the poem but only grazed on the reasons each man was offered as a suggestion. I wanted to be drawn into this big conspiracy mystery of who was the real writer. Instead I got a waffling play with no real ending and ghosts as witnesses.

Should you watch it? Eh, it’s not terrible but it’s not good either. Turn it on for some background noise maybe but it’s definitely not worth your attention.

Under The Christmas Tree | 2021 Christmas Movies

Usually, when we get a Christmas movie with a gay main couple, that couple is male. Lifetime changes it up with Under The Christmas Tree. Women rule this time around.

Charlie (Tattiawna Jones) is a tree whisperer. With her partner, Rohan (Shawn Ahmed), she is looking for a Christmas tree for the state capital. She finds the perfect tree on property owned by Alma (Elise Bauman) and her parents. Can Charlie convince Alma to let her cut down the tree?

I was intrigued to see where Under The Christmas Tree was going to go. After all, it was written by the guy that wrote 2020’s The Christmas Setup, which was really good. Thankfully, this one wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t quite as good as Setup but it wasn’t boring. Instead of trying to force the two women together, they were allowed to have the “love at first sight” moment that so many straight movies have. The first time Alma sees Charlie, she stumbles over her words. Charlie is a little more confident so she gets the “you know you want to be with me” personality. It was really nice to see this change. Having to watch women be stereotypically female all the time in Christmas movies sucks. I liked seeing all of the women have very different personalities.

With that said, I wouldn’t say this is the best Christmas movie. It still has some very slow parts and the main tree conflict is stupid. They also keep trying to throw Ricki Lake into scenes for no real reason. I think they wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth casting her.

Despite the slow parts, it was a decent movie to watch. It didn’t fully capture my attention but I was able to pay more attention than I have in the other movies I’ve watched this month.