The day after Thanksgiving, Rush Williams (Romany Malco) is up early like always to host his popular morning NYC radio show. At 5am he’s already fielding texts from his daughters for their Christmas lists which looks like “pony!” and “Prada bag!”. Are his kids spoiled? Well, they actually seem pretty sweet, but the four of them are used to a certain lifestyle and their expectations correspond to it. Plus, son Jamal just got into Harvard.

So it’s a really, really bad time for Rush to have lost his job, but that’s exactly what happens. Bad news waits for no one. And those kids are NOT pleased about their come down in life. As they move out of their lavish home and into the small house they grew up in, now occupied by Aunt Jo (Darlene Love), and plan for a scaled-down Christmas, dad Rush hears a lot of grumblings.

Meanwhile, Rush and his producer Roxy with the cool hair (Sonequa Martin-Green) scrape together just enough money to buy their old radio station, the one where they got their start. It’s small, but it’s theirs, an opportunity to build the show and the station they’ve always wanted. But the new owners at the old station aren’t making it easy, threatening the advertisers, hoping to turn off their lights before they play a single song.

At the risk of losing all credibility, the truth is I believe this Netflix holiday movie is a cut above. The script is almost always my biggest side of beef with these things but in the case of Holiday Rush, it’s no beef, it’s beef wellington, it’s roast beef, it’s prime rib. Settle down, Jay. Prime rib may be reaching. But it IS charming and smart, despite being written by two white dudes. And the acting is uniformly good, an impressive ensemble propped up by excellent, never obnoxious kid actors, convincing chemistry between Malco and Martin-Green, and Darlene Love is the icing on this gingerbread house, a real treat that we all deserve.

Meanwhile, Holiday Rush earns a little bit of extra integrity by addressing grief over the holidays, something so many of us deal with but often try to suppress. There’s a lot of pressure to be jolly over the holidays, but it’s a time of family, friends, and traditions which often make loved ones’ absences be felt more keenly. The truth is, grief can and must exist alongside joy. You can miss someone even as you welcome in someone new. Living, and enjoying life, is no disrespect to someone’s memory. The movie’s acknowledgement that grief can be part of a holiday normalizes it for us, gives us permission to feel two things at once and not beat ourselves up about it.

And of course there’s some heart-warming bullshit about making Christmas less consumer-y. How many Christmas movies will it take to convince us? “It’s not what you have, it’s what you have around you.” Absolutely true. But I’d also take the pony.