Christmas 2024 Wrap-Up

And now it is time to wrap up the 2024 Christmas season. It felt both hectic and laid back at the same time. I’m not sure how that happened!

This year I watched 74 Christmas movies. That is probably why this season felt more laid back. This was the the lowest number of movies I have watched since I moved from my advent calendar format. 2023 was 92 movies, 2022 was 127, 2021 was 78, and 2020 was 86. I think this is because Hallmark moved some of their new releases to their Hallmark+ streaming service, which I did not subscribe to this year. That cut at least seven movies from the schedule. It was also frustratingly difficult to find new movies this time around. Great American Family continues to change their movies after they have released their schedule. Movies they have announced to air on one date will be replaced by a different movie and air on a different date. It was so frustrating.

Speaking of Great American Family, I am going to cut them from the list of movies next year. While I wanted to continue to watch Candace Cameron-Bure and Danica McKellar, almost all of the movies on the channel are so boring and difficult to sit through. I hope that their 2025 movies don’t turn political but it feels like that is the way the channel is heading.

Since I am going to cut out GAF, I am going to spend more energy trying to find movies on other streaming channels. I didn’t watch anything on Roku, Disney+ (though I did watch one Hulu movie), or Peacock. There was also a locally-made movie released in theaters that I was hoping to go see but I couldn’t make it in time. And, who knows, maybe I will sign up for Hallmark+ this year. We’ll have to wait and see what their streaming-only releases are.

As always, please feel free to let me know if there is a streaming channel that you’d like me to cover. I know there are a million of them out there now. There has to be a channel with some great Christmas movies that I don’t know about.

Christmas 2023 Wrap-Up | 2023 Christmas Movies

I know you have been looking forward to my 2023 Wrap-Up post. Well, wait no longer. Here are the details!

In 2023, I watched 92 Christmas movies. While this is still more than the 78 movies I watched in 2021, it is a LOT less than the 127 movies I watched last year.

I did banish the terrible UPtv movies from the lineup but I ended up keeping Great American Family. I still don’t feel great watching the channel. It just feels wrong to not include the Candace Cameron Bure and Danica McKellar movies. And if I have the channel for those two, I might as well watch the other 18 movies they aired, right? Thankfully, the MyPillow and Gilmore Girls commercials were absent this year. I’d like to drop the channel next year but that probably won’t happen. Maybe I can find a way to watch it without actually contributing financially to the channel.

Besides GAF, I also covered movies aired on Hallmark, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Lifetime, Netflix, Hulu, Roku, Amazon Prime/Video/Freevee, Disney+, Paramount+, and Peacock. Sadly, I didn’t even check Discovery to see what they offered. I forgot all about it. Maybe their Christmas offerings will still be around in July and I can revisit them.

Plans for 2024? I like the number of movies I covered this year. I will try my best to keep the number of movies around 92. However, I would like to figure out how to get a better list of all of the Christmas movies airing each year. GAF really likes to change their schedule mid-season so that is unavoidable but I didn’t find out about some of the Amazon movies until the middle of December. Having a full schedule would make it easier to get a good handle on my review schedule.

Is there anything you would like me to add or subtract for next year? Is there a channel that you think I should watch? Do you think I should continue watching Great American Family? Leave me a comment and let me know. I need as much help as I can get!

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

Christmas 2022 Wrap-Up | 2022 Christmas Movies

It is finally time to officially wrap up the 2022 Christmas Movie season. I watched 127 movies this year. A giant change from the 78 I watched in 2021. Even adding in the 13 movies I watched this past August to finish the 2021 season, that is still 36 more movies for 2022. While I didn’t have a difficult time fitting all of those movies into my schedule (Don’t ask me how I did it. I don’t know.), I am going to need to make some changes for the 2023 Christmas season.

In 2022, I added two new channels to my lineup. Great American Family and UPtv. I am going to drop UPtv from the 2023 lineup completely. I don’t think there was a single good movie on the channel this year. All of their movies were so boring that it was difficult for me to finish watching a lot of them. Also, I’m tired of seeing commercials for Gilmore Girls.

As for Great American Family, my current plans are to drop the channel with the possibility of watching the Candace Cameron Bure movie and the Danica McKellar movie. I firmly disagree with the politics of the channel and I can’t, in good conscience, keep watching it. There were a few good movies but I was also bombarded by commercials from Mike Lindell, aka the My Pillow guy. This tells me that GAF supports the stolen election lie. In addition, Bure has straight up said that they will not be airing any LGBTQ+ movies. She can spin it all she wants but I will not support a channel that is so intolerant.

Hallmark, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Lifetime, Netflix, Hulu, and Roku Channel will all be staying. If HBO Max survives the merger with Discovery, I will also keep them on my list. I would love to add Discovery+ and Oprah Winfrey Network (which is streamed on Discovery+) to the lineup but, again, we will need to see what 2023 brings for the app before I can make that call.

My goal for 2023 is to get back to the 90ish movies that I watched in 2021. I want to make sure that I have a good selection of movies to talk about but not so many that it makes my mental health spiral out of control. If you have any suggestions or ideas, you can leave a comment below or shoot me an email. Thank you for sticking with me through this crazy Christmas season. I have so many plans for the rest of this year and I hope that you will come along with me.

Top 10 Worst Christmas Movies of 2022 | 2022 Christmas Movies

I watched a LOT of movies this season. Between November and December, I watched 127 Christmas movies. A majority of them fell into the “Wow, that’s boring” category. But there were some terribly awful movies as well. Here is my list of the Top 10 Worst Christmas Movies of 2022.

10. Long Lost Christmas
9. A Show-Stopping Christmas
8. A Maple Valley Christmas
7. The Holiday Dating Guide
6. My Favorite Christmas Tree
5. Another Christmas
4. Christmas Lucky Charm
3. A Tale Of Two Christmases
2. The Noel Diary
1. Christmas In Pine Valley

Dishonorable Mentions: The Holiday Swap, Sweet Navidad, A Christmas Masquerade, Aisle Be Home For Christmas, Scentsational Christmas, Christmas On The Rocks, Christmas In The Wilds

There we go. My 10 Worst Christmas Movie list. And Candace Cameron Bure’s piece of crap didn’t even make the list! Join me again tomorrow for my 10 Best Christmas Movies list.

A Merry Single Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

For my final Christmas movie review of 2022, I headed over to the Roku Channel to check out A Merry Single Christmas. I can’t tell you how happy I am that this season is over.

Morgan (Chelsea Gilson) and Liam (Andrew Rogers) have been dating for five years. When he doesn’t propose on their anniversary, as she was expecting, Morgan breaks off the relationship. Sad and depressed, Morgan signs up to attend a Christmas Lonely Hearts Club retreat. Also sad and depressed, Liam signs up for the same retreat. They try to pretend that they don’t know each other but their feelings get the better of them.

It’s movies like this that make me dread the Christmas romcom movie season. The premise sounds like it could be a ton of fun. Morgan saying things like “I’m sorry but what is your name again?” or Liam ‘accidentally’ getting facts about her wrong. They could have had this sort of passive-aggressive flirtation going on. But no. The movie did not do that. Instead of something fun, the movie gave us the usual boring fare, complete with Juliet (Sarah Armstrong), the retreat’s organizer, kicking out any couples that dared to begin a relationship. This retreat is for singles and those singles are forbidden from falling in love with each other.

I wanted to end the 2022 season on a positive note but that isn’t happening. Don’t bother with A Merry Single Christmas. All it will do is make you wish it was a better movie.

Another Christmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

This is the first year that I noticed a Christmas movie on the Roku channel. As usual, I didn’t do a lot of research before watching it so I knew nothing about Another Christmas before tuning in. I wish I knew less about it now.

Kelly (Sheena Faust) is an elementary school teacher alongside her friend, Tyler (Jimmy Willis III). Just before Christmas, Kelly gets a text from her ex-boyfriend (and Tyler’s best friend), Andrew (Malik Brazile). The two had parted on bad terms and Kelly is not willing to risk her heart again. But when Andrew comes home for the holidays, things just might change.

Another Christmas is a bad movie. Not a boring one, a bad one. And there are a lot of reasons why. First off, there are way, way too many characters. The movie begins by introducing each character or character pairing separately. It makes it very difficult to understand how the characters relate to each other. Instead of getting like five scenes that have nothing to do with each other, introduce the characters by having each of them come home for Christmas and we first meet them as they greet their family and friends. Or have a bunch of them meet up at a bar or restaurant or something. We, the audience, need something to bind these characters together and the movie doesn’t give us that.

Second, this is writer/director Stacie Davis’s first film as a director and it shows. There are a lot of strange shots where someone’s arm is in front of the camera and the audio echoes like they are in a tin can and the actors aren’t given direction so they just stand in one spot to talk to each other. It feels more like a movie a bunch of friends got together to make than a professional production. Davis only has one other script under her belt, Christmas in Carolina, which released in 2020. I’m not sure if Carolina suffers the same issue but the writing in Another Christmas comes off as if Davis has never held a conversation or even overheard someone talking. The sad thing is that I think this could have been a good script if it had gone through a couple more drafts and had some outside proofreaders.

Finally, give us an actual ending. This movie ended so abruptly that I actually had to rewind it and watch it again to make sure I didn’t miss something. I’m going to tell you the ending because there isn’t anything that it spoils. Camilla and Maison are a married couple having problems. The movie ends with Maison giving Camilla the keys to a Bermuda vacation house. She squeals excitedly, hugs him, and CREDITS. I have never seen a more jarring ending in my life. At no point do the two of them talk about wanting to own a vacation house in Bermuda. And Maison buying a whole house without talking to Camilla first doesn’t solve any of their problems. if anything, it’ll cause more problems. But we don’t get to know about any of that because the movie is DONE.

I really badly want some excellent Christmas movies that star people of color. The Liddle family series is a perfect example of a terrible movie that had great sequels and almost the entire cast is black. (I think there was a white neighbor in one of the movies.) All Another Christmas has to do is cut out part of the cast in order to focus on one or two of the couples and bump up the writing. I can’t recommend watching this movie but I am hopeful that something better is on the horizon.