Every year, there is a Candace Cameron Bure Christmas movie on the Hallmark Channel. This year’s gift is Christmas Town.
Hallmark’s favorite actress plays Lauren Gabriel, a teacher from Boston who gets a permanent position in Springfield. Before heading out on the train, she breaks up with her boyfriend because he wants to focus on his career instead of starting a family. On the way to Springfield, the train gets stopped at Grandon Falls due to a problem with the tracks. The passengers are forced to spend the evening in the small town. This stop proves to be a fateful stop for Lauren.
Usually, movies with Bure in them are very heavily Christian themed. Surprisingly, Christmas Town doesn’t try to shove God down your throat. Yes, there are some religious references but it’s all contained as people praying to God for something or saying it’s God’s plan type of things.
Instead of focusing on the religion, the movie focuses on foster children and charity. Travis (Tim Rozon), the romantic interest, has a foster child, Dylan (Jesse Filkow), who spends most of the movie giving his things away to the kids from a nearby town that basically burned down. Lauren, a former foster child herself, gets a donation drive started (in conjunction with The Salvation Army, of course) to help Dylan stop giving away everything he owns. (The adults don’t get mad at Dylan for giving away his coat every day. You would think someone would point out that coats are expensive and maybe he shouldn’t do that every single day.)
For the most part, Christmas Town isn’t terrible. I think my main problem is how quickly the plot goes. This would have been better as a miniseries instead of one movie. Within a few days, Lauren falls in love with the town, gets a new teaching job in Grandon Falls, decides to adopt Dylan, and falls in love with Travis. While Lauren, at one point, Lauren had said she was planning on staying a few weeks, everything seems to take place within a week. This should have taken place over a few months, especially with the adoption angle.
But should you watch it? Yes. Christmas Town is one of Bure’s better Christmas movies. It has some flaws but nothing that makes it unwatchable. On the contrary, it’s actually kinda sweet. Almost the perfect Christmas movie…for the Hallmark Channel, anyway.