It’s the most wonderful time of the year – when final exams are over and the fall semester is wrapping up and students everywhere can finally breathe a sigh of relief now that our remote semester is finally over.
To get into the Holiday spirit, here’s a list of Hallmark movies (available on the W Network) that will allow you to immerse yourself in a perfect, fluffy world filled with decorated houses and predictable plots, all while escaping the realities this season.
Though I must add, they have got a rep for being overly predictable, having a lack of diversity in the genre and the protagonists sharing an (infamous) G-rated kiss at the end of the film. Despite these obvious issues, these films have a surprising quality of wholesome
- A Christmas Waltz
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No Hallmark movie isn’t complete without the Hallmark Queen herself, Lacey Chabert! Staring in 18 movies (and counting), Chabert plays a distressed fiancé (and lawyer, because what’s a Hallmark movie without a workaholic protagonist?) who’s Christmas wedding was cancelled unexpectedly.
Chabert’s character cashes in on 10 dance classes with instructor Roman (played by Will Kemp) and while he teaches her to loosen up, both of them fall hard and learn from each other, all the while investing on a holiday venture.
- The Christmas House
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In this latest Hallmark release, audiences have praised the movie for having LGBTQ+ representation the channel promised to implement in July of this year.
The film follows the Mitchell family, Bill and Phylis are a troubled couple on the brink of separation and selling their family home. Their two sons. Michael and Brandon, are reunited for one last holiday hurray that the family carried as a tradition for years where they decorate their entire home before they sell.
While the senior Mitchell’s reminisces on Christmas past, Brandon and his partner Jake are waiting for approval from an adoption agency and Michael rekindles with an old-flame.
The film has a little bit of everything for everyone, and while the Hallmark formula wraps up everything in a nice little bow, it could have given more screen-time to the storyline of Brandon and Jake as well as a more developed backstory.
- Christmas Comes Twice
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In this new Hallmark release, astrophysicist Cheryl (played by Tamera Mowry-Housley) gets a second chance at love with an old flame when a Christmas carnival comes to town. Mowry-Housely’s character travels back five years to change the course of her life as she knows it through the power of a carousel ride.
This film takes on a classic element of a “Christmas wish to go back to the past” and change your life as we know it, Christmas Comes Twice is a story that will leave your heart-melting and your heart grow a size or two larger (it made mine)
- The Christmas Train
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Think Murder on the Orient Express, minus the murder and having a Christmas setting. As a journalism student, this film has all the elements of a classic Hallmark, though this time the lead is a male journalist (Dermot Langdon) who meets an eccentric group of characters on a train ride across America while trying to write a feature story on the experience.
The film follows a young couple, a filmmaker looking for his next movie pitch and his script doctor and a wild ensemble with a story of their own.
- A California Christmas
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Okay, so it’s not exactly a Hallmark movie per se, but it does have quite the familiar element: a predictable plot about a city slicker getting in touch with the rough side of life while trying to acquire farmland from a stubborn farmer.
This Netflix Christmas film does the exact opposite, however: the roles are switched as Callie and Joseph (written and played by Lauren Swickard and her real life husband Josh) butt-heads. Callie doesn’t want to give up her family farm, despite the medical debt her ailing mother is facing, all while Joseph is trying to purchase the land for his family company.
Throw in mistaken identities and some cliché high jinks, this film surprisingly breaks the typical Hallmark formula by showing not one, not two but THREE premarital kisses and—gasp—sex.