Christmas In Wolf Creek | 2022 Christmas Movies

Christmas In Wolf Creek is the last of the Hallmark/Lifetime/UPtv/Great American Family Christmas movies. And I’m not going to lie. I didn’t finish it. Let me tell you why.

Samantha (Nola Martin) and Austin (Tim Rozon) are trying to figure out how they can still be together. Samantha lives in Wolf Creek, where she rescues animals, while Austin is a rancher. He doesn’t want to move into town and she doesn’t want to live on the ranch. Can they come to an agreement?

As I said, I didn’t finish this one. This is a direct sequel from Love In Wolf Creek, which came out in either October or November 2022. Since I didn’t watch that one, I didn’t understand a lot of the references they made in the Christmas one. People kept talking about how Samantha and Austin fell in love rescuing a wolf and rescuing animals in the wild in what they do. Yet they argued through the entire first half of this movie, which is where I stopped watching.

If you watched Love In Wolf Creek, you might like Christmas In Wolf Creek. But if, like me, you didn’t watch the first one, you might not enjoy the second one either. Starting with a sequel instead of the original isn’t bad, unless the second movie makes so many references to the first that you get lost. It sucks.

Merry Swissmas | 2022 Christmas Movies

Usually, Christmas movie actors stick to one channel. For example, you rarely see Hallmark actors in Lifetime Christmas movies. Somehow, Jodie Sweetin has managed to be on both channels in one year. Maybe she is the true Queen of Christmas.

Alex (Jodie Sweetin) is an architect who travels the world designing luxury hotels. She decides to spend Christmas in Switzerland, where her mother (Jane Wheeler) is opening an inn. Little did Alex know that her mother invited her ex-best friend, Beth (Mikaela Lily Davies), who happens to be dating Alex’s ex-boyfriend, Jesse (David Pinard), to come for the holidays as well. She decides to spend her time helping Liam (Tim Rozon), who manages the inn, plan for the holiday festivities so she can avoid her troublesome personal problems.

Merry Swissmas is one of the few Christmas movies that treats children like children. Love interest Liam has a son, Kelby (Hudson Robert Wurster) and there is a scene where Alex talks to him about how he remembers his late mother. It is a touching scene that is so well done. There aren’t a ton of movies, especially movies where a parent has passed, where anyone asks the child how they are dealing with it. It was probably my favorite scene out of the entire movie.

Outside of that one scene, the rest of the movie is fine. There is some weirdness in how Alex handles the ancient grudge she holds against Beth for the stupidest of reasons. Yes, Alex is mad at Beth because Beth is dating her ex-boyfriend. It’s such a high school thing to be mad about. But it’s not even the fact that Alex is mad. It’s how she handles being around Beth. She barely even looks at Beth. And every time Beth tries to make a grand gesture to fix their relationship, Alex just walks away. She is not a nice person.

While I do wish they had left out the Beth/Jesse part of the story since it is completely unnecessary, I did think that Merry Swissmas was a pretty watchable movie. I would have liked it to focus a little more on Alex and Liam or Alex and her family but that’s OK. At least we all get to walk away with a little more knowledge about Swiss holiday traditions. That is something no other Christmas movie has given us.

Christmas Town | 2019 Advent Day 6

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.