So first of all, the good news is, there’s no way this movie can be as bad as its title. Right? Ten seconds in, I receive a shock. This is merely the “latest installment” in the “Father Christmas franchise.” Oh? IMDB fills me in: Finding Father Christmas and Engaging Father Christmas have come before. Indeed, terrible titles seems to be a bit of a tradition for these people.

Miranda (Erin Krakow) and Ian (Niall Matter) met at Christmas two years ago, when she was on a quest to learn the identity of her birth father. He was dead but his widow Margaret (Wendie Malick) welcomed her with open arms. Miranda and Ian got engaged on Christmas last year even though an ex-boyfriend was pursuing her. Guess what they’re doing this year! No really. Guess. If you guessed getting married, well, shame on you. Apparently Miranda (Erin Krakow) and Ian  (Niall Matter) have a history of problems arising, putting their relationship on ice. This time it’s an uncle she never knew existed.

Hallmark has taught me that there’s a wider variety of Christmas careers than I’d ever thought – and I don’t mean the actors who film these movies. Our dear Miranda makes her living decorating offices for Christmas. I do not know how she sustains that yearlong, and since the franchise only catches up with her around the holidays, I guess we’ll never know. TWO of Hallmark’s other heroines were prolific wreath makers. We’ve met Santa photographers and gingerbread makers and the people behind the curtains of Christmas pageants. So our Miranda decks the halls of corporate offices. And even though that seems like a pretty season job, she’s taken off this Christmas in order to get married. So I suppose her clients got beChristmased in August.

Marrying Father Christmas has long-lost relatives, new flames, old memories, and even some Dickens. I didn’t give a shit about this movie until the last 2 or 3 minutes, when they FINALLY get married in an intimate, wintry cottage setting, which is how I got married, only mine was of course much better because they were working on a Hallmark budget and I was spending ALL of Sean’s money. Plus, I’m a more is more kind of girl, with expensive, exquisite taste. Plus, when Sean and I were saying our vows, there was no awkward flashback sequence to the rest of our dating “franchise.” We saved all the cheese for the cheese course, which was fabulous.

Eve is an interim school superintendent. They bring her in on short contracts when a school board is bleeding money, and she tunes them up. It usually means hiring freezes and cutting ‘inessential’ programs, like art and music. It’s not a popular position, but Eve doesn’t mind. She likes the transitory nature of the job. It keeps her rootless and moving, which is how she likes it. Her mother doesn’t understand how this job is even possible for Eve, who used to be a musician herself, just like her dad before he left, or died, and apparently I didn’t care enough to learn which. Now Eve is in town to do the chopping job in her hometown. It means she’ll spend Christmas with her mother for the first time in years, and meet Liam, the cute single dad who just moved in next door. Who just happens to be the music teacher at the school she’s been sent to fillet. Awkward!

Now, since Hallmark has upped its casting budget into the quadruple digits in order to hire LeeAnn Rimes in the lead, we can all be pretty sure that something’s going to inspire her to find value in music again.

Turns out, she does have a caring bone in her body! She gets motivated to figure out how to raise the money without making the cuts. She enlists Liam’s help to put on a Christmas concert, and if you’ve ever had to sit through 3 hours of kids playing tubas, you know how much money you’d pay to attend. Hahaha, just kidding. They might make more money if people could pay to not attend, or at least to leave after their own kid’s 90 seconds of fame is up.

Anyway, the important thing to note is that it leaves her plenty of time to get cozy with the cute music teacher – and maybe to fall in love? To want to settle down? To stay and play house and care for the school forever and ever? Lucky for Eve, small towns in movies always rally behind last-ditch efforts. I have a good feeling about this, guys!

Nicky’s parents are super pumped about Christmas. Like, obsessed. Like, levels of enthusiasm approaching sickness. Nicky refers to it as OCD – obsessive Christmas disorder, but Nicky better watch her mouth as Target recently caught heat for selling a sweater that said the same. Insensitive to those who suffer from the actual disorder, they say, and nobody is as good at fixating on things as those afflicted with OCD, so in they end they triumphed over their oppressors; Target apologized and removed the offensive items from their shelves.

Anyway, Christmas has basically ruined Nicky’s whole childhood, so to her, it is serious, year round business. She rebels by taking up the tuba (please do not ask me the logic behind this), and improbably, she meets a fellow music nerd at band camp. Ahem. Tanner is super cute and they manage to keep up their long-distance relationship all through the fall. But come winter, Tanner wonders if he and his father might come out to California for a visit. Tanner’s dad has a heartbreak triggered by the holidays, so they keep things super low-key. Up until now, Nicky has managed to keep her family’s affliction to herself, but a visit is pretty much game over.

Logic being Nicky’s strong suit, she decides the only thing to be done is to use the empty house where she’s cat-sitting, hire actors to play her parents, and create a fake Christmas with which to trick her boyfriend. The auditions alone are enough to convinece you of just how bad an idea this is, but Nicky is young and optimistic, which is the nice way of saying stupid, and they go full steam ahead with a plan that backfires harder than Santa’s sleigh after the reindeer annual chili cookoff.

The trio of young actors – Juliette Angelo, Kirrilee Berger, Javier Bolanos – are actually pretty watchable. My holiday movie standards are super low after overdosing on Hallmark trash, so I’m giving I’ll Be Next Door for Christmas a solid “not horrible” rating. I cannot go so far as to call it good, but it is occasionally funny, sometimes even on purpose, and I have to give it bonus points just for not being a Hallmark piece of coal.

After the death of her grandma, Sydney and daughter Rayanne spend Christmas in the house they inherited from her.  Sydney is newly divorced and recently bereaved, so her Christmas spirit is understandably a little tarnished. A local book store brings a little cheer her way in the form of Mac, the town’s 4th grade teacher and resident Santa, with whom the store’s owner, Bea, keeps trying to set up a very reluctant Sydney.

I don’t know about you, but I manage to vacation without becoming completely entangled in local politics. Sydney’s in town for less than 2 weeks but for some reason she finagles a job – “a little fun for the holidays,” she calls it, as if she’s never had a job before, as if the rest of us aren’t desperately trying to secure as many days OFF at the holidays as possible.

Anyway, little Rayanne makes a special Christmas plea to Santa to make her mom feel better. Underneath the beard, it’s really Mac, who moves her wish to the top of his list.

Will Sydney leave the big city to embrace small town life in Hopewell, which includes Mac, or will she stay where the big career opportunities are? That’s right: it’s a question not worth asking, and even the script doesn’t pretend it’s very serious. We know from the very first snowflake that of course Sydney and Rayanne are staying in their grandmother’s house. They’re going to make a family with sad widower Mac. And they’re going to take over running Bea’s book store. The only surprise in the whole movie is when a Christmas tree falls over, but they somehow turn that into not just a Christmas emergency, but an event so dire it threatens Christmas itself. Yes, that’s what passes for conflict in Hallmark holiday movies: a tipped over Christmas tree. And that’s fine. As far as I can tell, these films aren’t meant to be good. Between their unerring formula and the homogeneity of their cast, Hallmark movies are the equivalent of that channel that just plays the crackling fire round the clock. It’s background noise.