I absolutely love Christmas movies. Both good ones and the Hallmark ones that are the exactly same story and characters in every movie. You know the ones: a city girl ends up in countryside either intentionally or accidentally just before Christmas, meets a handsome local guy who she has problems first but as they save the local Christmas (there’s almost always a fundraiser!) they fall in love. Oops, sorry for spoiling them all.
Don’t expect any deep dives or long reviews: most of the movies are the same so there’s very little to say.
And before you ask: yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
For 2025, here’s a list of the movies I’ve been watching.
Movies
One Royal Holiday (2020)
One Royal Holiday. I started the year with One Royal Holiday, a movie I haven’t seen before. This one is only half-way same story as what I described above but instead belongs to the other popular genre where a regular girl falls in love with a prince. This time it’s the royalty who gets stranded in the girl’s town and she gets to help them out. Very classic story.
Christmas on Every Page (2025)
Christmas on Every Page. The IMDB page says it all: “A big-city ad exec visits her hometown to rescue her family’s bookstore. Working with a talented local artist on a holiday mural project, she rediscovers both her creative spark and her roots in the community.” Yup, that’s a classic Christmas hallmark-esque story for you. It ticks every single box of the formula and doesn’t try to hide it at all. I watched it on the evening of my first day in a new client project and it was perfect story for my mushed brain.
Christmas in Rome (2019)
Christmas in Rome. One of the streaming services I use just dropped 6 of these movies at once and I’m all in for it. Lacey Chabert (previously known from original Mean Girls and Not Another Teen Movie) stars the movie which already lifts this movie’s star power to different heights compared to many other.
It hits all the beats with one twist: this time it’s the man who is a cold business person whose heart is melted by the Christmas spirit. 2/3 into the movie, I completely forgot it was about Christmas, that’s how little of it there was in the movie.
Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story (2025)
Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story. I mean, it’s happy for once to see Bills fans being happy — even if it requires a Hollywood romcom. Even in-universe, Bills isn’t a team that wins. C’mon, you write a happy go lucky movie about Bills and even in that one, they don’t win championships. In my dreams, my team usually comes out on top.
The main storyline is that, umm, everyone (including a Santa) is a big Bills fan. There may have been something else there too but it was hard to spot from the Bills memorabilia. I’m a hardcore sports fan and this movie was a lot.
The main dude is played by Alexandra Daddario’s little brother and let me tell you, that family has the handsome/beautiful genes. Acting still might need a bit of work though but with these kinds of movies and writing, the acting ain’t a problem.
Compared to other movies (as you can see from the length of this entry…), there’s no classic “business woman meets country man and they fall in love”. Instead, they are already in love with each other, just haven’t told each other and neither of them is an annoying “I hate people” type businessperson.
I won’t spoil the ending but let’s just say, there’s no Super Bowl being played on Christmas.
Cranberry Christmas (2020)
Cranberry Christmas. A proper Hallmark movie about a couple who own a cranberry farm but whose relationship has grown distant due to business. The movie has very strong Christmas vibes: everything is covered in snow and Christmas decorations. A small town festivities welcome a popular TV show to film their celebrations which forces the couple to act happy and as we all know, acting like you’re in love with someone always makes you fall in love with them for realsies.
Grounded for Christmas (2019)
Grounded for Christmas. Remember how in the last movie I mentioned
as we all know, acting like you’re in love with someone always makes you fall in love with them for realsies
Yup, that’s this movie too.
The first thing I noticed in this movie is how Ted Atherton looks quite like Tony Hawk.
Everything in this movie is just a setup to get the main characters to interact with each other on their way to falling for each other. I guess it fulfills the old “every scene should serve the story” movie making principle but it would have been cool if those scenes had bit more weight on their own.
Return to Christmas Creek (2018)
Return to Christmas Creek. When the IMDB description starts with With Christmas approaching, a career-focused Chicago app developer, you know we’re dealing with a real Christmas movie spirit. The backstories of both of our main characters is there with all the classics: the woman is a busy businesswoman who comes home for Christmas and the man moved away back in the day but returned to home town.
What makes this movie so much more enjoyable to watch is that neither of the main characters are obnoxius, selfish pricks like they so usually are. They are actually pretty nice people and they get along with each other and family, even when there are some conflicts. That was a really nice change of pace.
It’s a Christmas story with almost all the Hallmark (no existing boyfriend/fiancé!) tropes but actually enjoyable human characters.
A Timeless Christmas (2020)
A Timeless Christmas. Hallmark’s other trope is this weird time-travel thing where a man from a distant time ends up in modern world and finds a woman who teaches them modern life and with whom they fall in love with. It’s a fascinating genre.
It turned out to be quite a good movie though. They got over the “it’s awkward to life in time where everything is weird” in like one scene which was positive as that’s a trope I hate in stories like these.
A Christmas Love Story (2019)
A Christmas Love Story. Judging a movie by its cover, I expected a one-for-one Hallmark movie but got an actually nice and heartfelt Christmas romcom. A boy with a talent for singing joins a choir secretly from his father and finds a new love for music.
It’s not the deepest and most complex plot for a movie but I was positively surprised. I did not expect the movie to go the way it went which is quite a surprise for a Christmas romcom as they usually just follow the same plot points beat for beat.
Kevin Quinn who plays the main character looks so much like young Ed Westwick (of Gossip Girl fame) that I had to take a good a look to make sure it wasn’t him. This seems to be a theme for this year’s Christmas movie marathon.
The Holiday (2006)
The Holiday. Time to take a break from the Hallmark movies and watch a proper movie. I love The Holiday. It’s one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time and that contrast is even bigger after watching all these other movies first.
The cheap production Hallmark clones over do the Christmas aesthetics. The Holiday shows a Christmas movie doesn’t have to have snow and Santa and Christmas decorations filling every scene of the movie — as long as there’s actual plot, character development and charming scenes to compensate for it.
It’s one of those movies where you can dream of being in any of the main characters shoes at different times in life. And the cast is just brilliant.
Holiday for Heroes (2019)
Holiday for Heroes. Back to Hallmark movies after the enjoyable experience of a proper movie. This movie is so American. Like most of Hallmark is very American other than the kind of lust of British historic times in their time travel movies. But this one is extra American with their military thing. It’s a movie about a military guy who helps the main woman of the movie to rally up their local community to help the troops get into Christmas spirit.
Literally nothing in this movie is something for me to identify with. It’s American troops thing mixed with the American capitalist Christmas.
Christmas Under the Stars (2019)
Christmas Under the Stars. I have been watching Hallmark Christmas movies for years and I still don’t quite know if they consider the business workaholic part of their universe a positive and worthy of admiration or a negative and something to get away from.
On one hand, a lot of these stories are about someone business oriented ending up in countryside and they find happiness outside the big cities and business life. On another hand, a lot of the business side is portrayed as a great status symbol and at least in the setup, is portrayed as admirable. Their obsession with it feels weird regardless.
You can tell that this movie is fiction and fantasy because a person gets fired, walks down the street and a random Christmas tree sales guy offers him a job. Also, the dude who hires him explains he figured the other guy might be unemployed because he’s walking in the city in the middle of the day. They truly live in a capitalist hell hole.
It is still one of the better Hallmark movies. It has most of the Christmas romcom clichés and most of the heartwarming moments are in the category of helping with issues caused by orphan crushing machines but hey, you can’t have it all. It was better than my expectations of it.
Muumien taikatalvi (2017)
Based on Tove Jansson’s beloved Moomin characters and 1957 book of the same name, this Finnish-Polish collaboration movie is a lovely version of the story. I watched the Swedish-spoken version as that’s what was available in the local public streaming service. The Swedish one has such a stellar cast of voice actors like Stellan Skarsgård (who I mostly know from his wonderful role as Bill in Mamma Mia) and Alicia Vikander (who is just generally brilliant actor).
The stop-motion animation style is wonderful, especially when contrasted with the usual and popular animation style. In the movie, Moomintroll ends up spending winter awake instead of slumbering and gets to experience a whole new adventure.
The Christmas Club (2019)
The Christmas Club. After one quality movie, back to Hallmark. Somehow, Elizabeth Mitchell is starring in this one. Is she the best actor Hallmark Christmas romcoms has ever seen? This is way after her breakout career even. After series like Lost, Once Upon a Time and Expanse, Hallmark movie sounds out of line. As a viewer, I can’t complain.
With the previous Hallmark movie, I was wondering about their relationship with business in these movies and this movie is mostly about business. The entire side story is about starting a business and that’s how they fall in love.
Pastori ja ruma joulukuusi (2025)
Pastori ja ruma joulukuusi (Yle Areena, only accessible in Finland). This Finnish short-film about a new pastor in a small town who wants to inspire his congregation with a Christmas tree event is definitely not a Hallmark movie but a really Finnish movie.
Die Hard (1988)
Die Hard. Only one way to finish this year’s Christmas series. One of the Finnish TV channels is showing it as the prime time movie on the Christmas Eve so that’s how I’m spending my evening. Normally, I don’t want to assume everyone’s heard of some movies but I have a feeling Die Hard is one of those movies that most people reading this note have either seen themselves (some multiple times) or at least have heard of it.
John McClane is a cop trying to save Christmas. Or something like that. Yippee ki yay, motherfucker.
It’s a Christmas classic.
Merry Christmas.
SIKE!
Jiminy Cricket’s Christmas (1983)
Jiminy Cricket’s Christmas. Christmas day the telly showed Jiminy Cricket’s Christmas and it’s a lovely one so I just had to watch it. You can say a lot about Disney, both old and new but this is just solid gold. Prime Disney in many ways, especially in the animation department.
The version we got is the 47 minute version that to my knowledge is a shortened version from 1986 compared to the 90 minute one that IMDB links to but apparently still the same listing. This is the version I’ve grown up with: it’s one of those children’s shows they show every Christmas in television here.
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
The Muppet Christmas Carol. I was already ready to call it a Christmas over but then a fellow Mastodonian Jenica invited us to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol together in a global Fedi watch party. I couldn’t pass such an invitation, especially on a Christmas Day with nothing else to do than eat chocolate and watch movies.
It felt good to watch some good proper Christmas movies after all the Hallmark ones.