Tag: Christmas movie marathon

I Did Not Learn My Movie Challenge Lesson

I Did Not Learn My Movie Challenge Lesson

Having learned nothing from my Halloween Horror Challenge, I have decided to watch as many Hallmark movies as my brain can take over the next two months. Well, I guess I learned my lesson a little bit, since I have enough sense to modify the rules.

Another plus to this Hallmark Shenanigan is that I absolutely love Hallmark movies. They are comforting, predictable, and give me some level of contentment so I don’t think it’ll be a matter of talking myself into watching them. I definitely did have to talk myself into watching the horror movies.

Here’s the setup:

I have Hallmark for the holiday season and I want to see how many Christmas movies I can watch between November 1st and Christmas. I am thinking about going until New Year’s Eve, though. I don’t have a solid goal number, but I do have a sort of target number that would be nice to hit. 60. Which seems like an insane number, now that I’ve typed it out. Maybe I’ll shoot for 45. I guess it doesn’t matter, really.

Hallmark has something like 300 Christmas movies along with a handful of Hanukkah and New Year’s movies. I decided to limit it to movies made in 2020, 2021, and 2022 just to have an arbitrary way to cut down on the movies I have to choose from. There are still 76, by the way.

Here’s the plan:

There isn’t one, really. Just watch movies as often as I can, I guess. That’s not going to be particularly easy, though. My November and December are packed with travel, blogging, getting healthy, work, gatherings, shows, and obviously all the holidays. Plus, since Shane isn’t particularly interested in Hallmark Movies (surprising, eh?), we probably won’t be watching them when we’re hanging out together. Since we enjoy each other, we tend to hang out as much as possible. During October, it was really helpful that he enjoys horror movies and was excited to watch them with me.

Honestly, though, this is just formalizing my already very well documented hobby of Hallmark Christmas movie watching. It’s sort of my seasonal jam.

-S

My Christmas Movie Marathon

My Christmas Movie Marathon

This past Saturday a good friend of mine came down to celebrate Christmaspalooza – a several years old tradition we have of watching Christmas movies (usually bad ones) and making baked goodies. This is the lineup from this year:

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding

Aldovia is a tremendously poorly run country who should have democratic elections promptly. The movie rarely has the bride and groom in the same room, which was a super weird choice. I didn’t watch this for Count Simon’s redemption arc or the government’s financial failings. 

Christmas Inheritance

This was pretty cute, I won’t lie. It was the perfect amount of Hallmark-like shenanigans. The formula worked well, though I found myself liking her original boyfriend more than you’re supposed to like the original man in her life. I’m reasonably sure she has to move back to New York City to run her company (that she inherited from her dad even though she showed no aptitude for leadership), so that’s a nice change. My friend called it ‘A Trump Family Christmas’, but I feel like that’s an unfair comparison. She’s not nearly as spoiled by the end of the movie as she does in the beginning.

The Christmas Chronicles

This is by far my favorite of the four movies! I actually enjoyed all four, to differing degrees, but this is the best. Kurt Russell is so dang good. His Santa Claus is an excellent twist on the usual one. And Oliver Hudson in the beginning made me happy.

This movie is a kids’ Christmas adventure that reminds me of 1990s Christmas movies. It made me nostalgic, though I don’t know how it would stack up to them. 

It’s a really cute movie, y’all, and I would definitely recommend it. The older brother sucks for a good bit of the beginning, just so you know.

The Holiday Calendar

This movie is so dang cute. It’s just a feel-good Christmas movie with questionable judgement on her part until she suddenly ‘sees the light’ at the end. 

I love a good Advent calendar in real life, so you know I loved seeing a magical one bring love to someone. I love a good trope, too, so the best-friend-is-your-true-love-you-dummy is also right up my alley. A photographer dealing with her parents asking about her life choices feels pretty legit, but then they’re won over by some art at a school auction which makes me wonder if they ever looked at her work. Still cute, though.

I still have a ton of movies that I want to watch, but haven’t had the chance yet and might not get the chance to before Christmas. I have part of next week off (from work *and* family) so I might just declare one of those days to be another movie marathon. I feel like you can watch Christmas movies through to New Year’s.

~Sarah~