Front Street Pictures, Trade Street Productions
Gil Bellows, Aren Buchholz, Tom Cavanagh, Mike Coleman, Faith Ford, Emma Lahana, Gabrielle Miller
Emily (Faith Ford) misses her daughter Heather (Emma Lahana) who is a college student in Boston. Heather doesn’t want to go home and deal with Mom’s insistence on elaborate holiday traditions since her father died. Rather than deal with it, she lies to her mom and tells her she is staying in the dorm to study, but is planning a trip to Arizona with her boyfriend. She arranges a house swap with Charles (Tom Cavanagh) who is an English professor from Boston who is trying to finish his novel and wants a quiet place to study, while Emily takes off to Boston to surprise Heather for Christmas. Meanwhile, not aware of the house swap, Faith (Gabrielle Miller) drops in on Charles, gets stuck and has to share the house with Charles. To top it off, Emily (who swapped the house with the professor from Boston to surprise her daughter) has Ray (Charles’ brother) drop in to see him and finds Emily in the house. This is a problem with house swaps. If you don’t tell everyone where you’re going, nobody knows where anybody is and everybody is confused. And by now we’re all confused too. A holiday romance about travel screw-ups and plenty of new found friends.
Debbie Macomber’s books, especially the Christmas stories, are very whimsical and have a lot of humor. They offer complex situations with very little explanation which makes it all more magical. She has also done two other Christmas stories which were made into Hallmark holiday movies: Debbie Macomber’s Mrs. Miracle (2009) and Call Me Mrs. Miracle (2010). This is the third year in a row we have a new Christmas movie from Debbie Macomber, and it’s becoming a habit.
I am not sure this is as good as the first two. It’s kind of similar to the storyline of “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz, but a bit more complicated. The actors are certainly good, and the story is complex and interesting. I liked the movie, but found it a little harder to follow than the previous Mrs. Miracle films. Once I figured out what was going on, it made a lot more sense to me. Not a bad film, at all, it’s a good romantic comedy with a Christmas theme, so that’s not bad. Watch for this one on the Hallmark Channel. It’s an easy way to spend a couple hours.
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