Christmas Made to Order | Blogmas Day 9

 Hey Guys x

Happy Blogmas Day 9!

This is a Hallmark movie that I found on Netflix. The premise looked cute, so I thought that it would be a good one to include in Blogmas.

An architect (Jonathan Bennett), who is hosting Christmas for his family for the first time, hires the help of a holiday decorator (Alexa PenaVega) who is trying to get her business off the ground.

As expected, this probably isn't the best Christmas movie you'll see, but it also won't be the worst.

The first thing I noticed while watching the film was that, all of the characters' reactions to everything seem so huge and over-the-top. Everything seemed like a bigger deal than it was because of their expressions and the way they spoke.

Because of this, it takes a while for these characters to settle down and start to feel like real people. At points, it feels and sounds like we're watching the actors reading from their scripts.

As much as I love these generic rom-com Christmas movies, I am slowly but surely getting bored of the trope where the woman's entire personality is loving Christmas, and the man's personality consists of either hating Christmas, being a workaholic, or both. Can these characters get new personality traits please?

Nevertheless, the story is interesting and familiar, so it's a very easy watch. These characters, as over-the-top as they are, are very nice to spend time with. Our two main characters, Steven and Gretchen are a nice couple, and they do have good chemistry.

The only new thing that this film did was introduce another storyline with the architect's niece (played by Bailee Michelle Johnson). They didn't go into that storyline as much as I would have liked, but it was really nice to get out of the Christmassy romantic mindset for a bit.

The conflict of the movie comes completely out of nowhere, and it was clear that it was created for the sake of drama. Having said that, in the overall scheme of the movie, the conflict makes sense because of their wildly different personalities. For me, it was the making up that didn't make that much sense because the architect ended up changing his whole personality in a way that wasn't hinted until 5 minutes before it happened.

Overall, this is a cute, festive story. But there are better Hallmark movies out there.

Originality - 2/10

Christmas Spirit - 8/10

Christmas Music - 4/10

It's 16 days until Christmas!

Come back tomorrow for Blogmas day 10!

Lou