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Holiday Movies I Have Sat Through

The Rating System

Other Notes

2024 - Holiday Movies Watched

🎄🎄🎄🎄 No. 1 - A Christmas Prince

This is The Formula, they really hit all the notes with this one. Girl with sad backstory and stalled career meets misunderstood Prince who is deep down just a nice guy who wants to find a nice girl (and be a good King). He also has a sassy little sister who has spina bifida, and I like that it’s named once but then never remarked on again. She’s my favorite character. Oh! And there’s a gorgeous black horse with magnificent floofy fetlocks. It makes it’s neigh into the second movie too.

🎄🎄🎄 No. 2 - A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding 🏳️‍🌈

Kinda boring, but it works hard enough for three trees. Once again the best thing here is the sassy little sister. At about 1 hr 16 minutes in there’s a shot of Amber’s dad wearing a blue crewneck sweater that someone just…took some red and white yarn to and made little designs on? Like…mimicking a yoke, maybe? Terribly? As a knitter, it offended me greatly. 😂

🎄🎄🎄 No. 3 - A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby 🏳️‍🌈

Utterly and completely and mind-freaking-blowingly ridiculous and absolutely perfect for what I used it for: a story to follow in the headphones while I made my holiday cards. In the last third the magnificent horse from prior movies with the glorious fetlocks, makes an appearance. Great sets and costumes as usual, lots of color and Christmas decor.

🎄🎄🎄🎄 No. 4 - A Heidelberg Holiday

This one is about Heidi, an American woman who makes glass ornaments and dreams of selling them at a fancy holiday market in Germany. She has a German grandmother who gets her in and sets her up with a family nearby whose guest house she’ll stay in while she’s there, and oh hey they also have a son who is charming and sweet and with whom she instantly has rapport, oh and he also has a sweet sister she’s instantly friends with, GEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN I HAVE NO IDEA. It’s my kind of romance, they move slowly and actually seem to be friends and like real things about each other.

I admit I was super set up to like this movie: I had a German grandmother (though her connections to Germany had faded a long time ago), and one of my best friends is named Heidi and has German family she visits regularly - she also speaks German and has a German passport. Hearing about her trips over the years has always made me wonder what it’d have been like to have been able to visit my now-very-distant relatives, and watching this movie is basically watching our heroine Heidi have one charming German cultural experience after another while walking around gorgeous scenery. It was a very relaxing movie, I’d happily watch this again next year.

🎄🎄🎄 No. 5 - A Biltmore Christmas

A Hollywood writer tasked with rewriting an old Christmas classic movie called The Merry Wife, wants to redo the romantic ending to be ambiguous so it’s more “realistic and meaningful,” i.e. far less romantic. Her boss isn’t too keen on the idea and forces her to spend a week at the Biltmore Hotel, where the movie was originally filmed in the 1940’s. I feel like this could have gotten 3 and 1/2 trees, if we had 1/2 tree icons. It’s missing the 4th tree because the story didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped, and I won’t watch it again, but a lot of people might really dig this one (it’s apparently pretty popular on Netflix right now). It has Jonathan Frakes! Foxy bearded Riker is now a sweet hotel manager named Winston. Our writer ends up going back through time to the original set of the film inside the hotel, and discovers that the script was originally written with a bittersweet ending. To find out the full story, she has to keep going back.

I’m <waves hands at this page of Christmas movies> OBVIOUSLY able to suspend disbelief to some fantastic levels - I watched three movies about an American journalist who becomes Queen of a fictional European country. However, Biltmore messed up with the time travel, immediately breaking one of the rules it set up, and that kinda broke my brain and I just wasn’t into it after that. It didn’t help matters that the heroine and I had little in common and I didn’t share her attraction to the love interest, he was way too slick and pushy for me (although the watch gift was very sweet). I know it was the 40’s but if a guy called me “kid” that would wig me all the heck out. Yes, it’s a silly Christmas movie and all, that but as a comparison, Heidi in A Heidelberg Holiday had a way more convincing (and sweeter) romance going on.

Note on: A Merry Scottish Christmas

Netflix, in all its Christmas movie algorithmic glory, keeps pushing this movie at me. I kept looking at it and getting totally turned off, but not for any obvious reason. After a few nights of this I actually stopped and looked at it. I should be jumping to watch this movie, it’s probably fully of gorgeous Scottish scenery, all castles and misty green hills and tartans everywhere you look, but something is just wrong. I’m staring at it, and it hits me: they’re SIBLINGS. Scott Wolf and Lacey Chabert. Not in real life, but in the only context I know them from: Party of Five, a TV show that was on in the 90’s. This might be the most Gen X media handicap I have ever noticed.