Jules’s sister and brother-in-law died last Christmas, leaving her to raise her nephew Milo and niece Maddie alone. It’s a daily struggle about to get worse when Jules loses her job shortly before the holidays. But then one day, a man improbably named Paisley Winterbottom shows up at the door, with an olive branch and some plane tickets. Turns out, the kids’ father was some member of royalty disowned by his father the Duke when he fell in love with a commoner with no wealth or title. Now on his death bed, the Duke of Castlebury is entertaining some regrets, and hopes that Jules and the children will visit him.

Penury is an even greater motivator than forgiveness, so Jules (Katie McGrath) makes the trek out with Milo and Maddie in tow. The Duke (Roger Moore) may or may not be on his last legs, and may or may  not have turned over a new leaf, but his son, Prince Ashtom (Sam Heughan) is dashing, handsome, and a little more progressive-minded than his father. If the Duke is not entirely welcoming, the Prince and indeed the staff make up for it. And soon Jules and the kids are decking the halls of what used to be a very cold castle.

Are cute grandkids enough to melt the Duke’s heart? And how will he feel if another son (his only living one left!) is about to fall in love with an unemployed single mother from Buffalo, New York? Well, if butler Winterbottom has anything to do with it (and why wouldn’t the staff be overly involved?), he’s going to push them together and even buy her a ball gown if that’s what it takes. Let the princess transformation begin!

The world has an appetite for royalty at the holidays, that much is clear. And it’s also pretty clear that Sam Heughan needed to pay the bills before Outlander came knocking. The result is A Princess For Christmas – you can take it or leave it.

When Captain Grace Garland returns home from two tours of duty with the Marines, there’s no one at the airport to greet her, no poster board with her name on it, no half-wilted but well-intentioned bouquet of flowers, no weeping mother or horny husband or gleeful children, or even a welcome home lick from the dog who’s been missing her. And everyone who’s been away should be missed.

Driving herself home, she gets into a minor accident, and a sweet, sweet puppy named Justice finds and leads her to a nearby farm. Turns out, Grace is a dog lover, having worked with them in the canine unit of explosive detection and search and rescue in Afghanistan. So she knocks on the puppy’s door, and her owner is the handsome owner of some antibiotic cream. Grace is happy to spend a little extra time giving Justice belly rubs because she’s had to leave behind her dog, the verygoodboy named Christmas. The holidays are making her sad as they just remind her of her best four-legged friend.

Meanwhile, Grace’s owner Joe is the town’s judge, the kind of judge who commutes a teenager’s speeding ticket in exchange for a promise that he’ll go to college. It is all kinds of trite and eye-rolly. And Joe may be a judge, but he’s got some pretty crappy judgment, particularly as he tries to prevent Grace from leaving the very town he himself plans to leave. If he likes Grace, and we all know that’s pretty much baked into the premise, he’s got a weird way of showing it.

This holiday is nothing special, not even very noticeable. Perhaps if you’re wanting to pair Christmas romance with some good old fashioned law and order, you’re in luck? Does that sound desirable in any way? It’s a bit of a tough sell, but at least there’s cute doggies!

I heckle a lot of Christmas movies, especially the Hallmark ones, for being unforgivably cheesy and predictable. Those are the staple ingredients of their white bread movies, and you need to add a LOT of your own salt in order to make it palatable. But Wish For Christmas is bad in an entirely new way.

Anna (Anna Fricks) is a typical high school student, gearing up for the winter ball. Her parents, Luke (Joey Lawrence, with eyebrows so perfectly sculpted they’re suspicious) and Elizabeth (Leigh-Allyn Baker), are super religious. They “bring light to the law” in their law practice, which is not-for-profit, actually turns away paying customers, and focuses only on helping poor people whose homes are being foreclosed. And somehow they stay afloat. Don’t question it. Their family puts god first, which means never missing church, and praying before you eat pizza, and forbidding your teenage daughter from dressing like a teenage daughter. Although they’ve still managed to raise a real bitch. But then disaster strikes: the winter ball gets moved to Christmas Eve, which means Anna can’t go, as she is obligated to attend services at her uncle’s church. So she did the only thing that makes sense. She uses her nightly prayer to wish that her parents do not believe in god anymore. And it works!

So now her parents are non-Christian, which means her dad says things like “Hey, man” and her mom lets her buy a dress that doesn’t suck, and they toast their business with actual wine that they actually drink. And they get very worked up when a very expensive vase gets broken. Oh and they don’t pick up their phone on the first ring. But the rest of the town still thinks of them as religious, so they still show up for Bible study and such. Oh boy is it awkward. Consider them added to the town’s prayer list.

This movie gives Christians a bad name, and makes them look like fools. And when the screenwriter imagines the nefarious things nonChristians get up to, it’s even more ludicrous. Like, the secretary now has to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. It’s impossible to take this shit seriously and important that you don’t. Jesus needs to fire his publicist. Wish For Christmas is every kind of bad except the kind that’s so bad it’s kind of good. This is so bad it stays bad, and makes you feel dirty, leaves a grimy film on the holiday season, and on movies generally.  It’s going to take a real miracle to adequately cleanse myself of this movie’s awfulness.

After years traveling with a professional figure skating show as trainer and choreographer, Katie’s about to retire, return home, and buy an ice rink to start her own training centre. But first, a last show, in a small European country called San Senova, where King Alex is in his 3rd year reigning a country founded on the holiday – like, literally on Christmas Eve, yet he struggles to express any holiday cheer.

Brace yourself: Katie and Alex are going to fall in love. But how, if she was on her way home to New Jersey? Well, Alex has a young daughter who is also a figure skater. And so Katie gets hired to choreograph an ice-skating retelling of their country’s founding, which Princess Christina has devised to prevent her father from being known as ‘the grinch king’ for the fourth year running.

Anyway, if Katie is able to resist the urge to stay in a palace, she can’t say no to royal money. This movie has it all: royalty, those spandex figure skating outfits, a gift-giving guide, crafting, dead mothers, even soap-opera-level cliff-hanger gasps. And if one love story doesn’t suit you, how about two? Yes, Christmas At The Palace is so crowd-pleasing, even the second bananas fall in love.

Clearly there is a market for Christmas movies in castles. Holidays AND romance aren’t enough anymore. In the era of Kate and Megan, we need a possibility of becoming a princess in order to feel. Luckily, Hallmark’s just leaving their palace set up year-round and they’re filming holiday special after holiday special in one unknown but lookalike European castle after another.

This movie, like most on the Hallmark channel, is an old sweater. It’s comforting because it never surprises you.

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.