With the Christmas season rapidly approaching, I suppose I should squeeze in a few seasonally appropriate films. Unfortunately, in a bid to cover the most familiar titles attached to the holiday, I have already reviewed those most universally recognized as good.  Yet, if you go on Netflix and start scrolling, particularly through the section labeled “Feel Good Movies,” you will see a whole host motion pictures, the majority of which I am betting would be unfamiliar to you.  My theory is that the popular streaming service is carrying on the work started by the old Hallmark Channel, which I guess is still around, even if cable is a slowly dying medium.  Thus, I will have to start delving into the abyss of Netflix Christmas titles.  Thus, my apologies to those of you who receive these articles via a subscription sent to your email.  Those who only interact with The Legionnaire on social media get to see whatever highlight I choose to chuck at them, and typically weeks or months behind, whereas you get to see them fresh off the presses.  I will be posting about the well-known Christmas films on Facebook and X.  Hopefully, between now and December 25^th, I will find an unknown gem.  In the meantime, try to enjoy what I have to say about Best. Christmas. Ever!

A title like Best. Christmas. Ever! has a lot to live up to, and that is as fitting of a segue into this turkey (pun intended) as I can give you.  Charlotte Sanders (Heather Graham) is a former inventor working as an engineer for an appliance company that is about to go under because of a faulty robotic vacuum cleaner that spontaneously combusts.  That is getting ahead of myself.  She has an adoring, dreamer of home improvement worker named Rob Sanders (Jason Biggs).  Together they have a daughter who wishes she had superpowers, Dora (Abby Villasmil), and a ninja wannabe son, Grant (Wyatt Hunt), who has a creepy stuffed monkey he calls Bob.  This sounds like your typical American family, and to Charlotte it seems even more pedestrian every year when she gets a Christmas newsletter from an old friend, Jackie Jennings (Brandy Norwood).  Jackie’s holiday updates make the Jennings family seem perfect.  She has recently sold her business and has retired early; Valentino (Matt Cedeño), her husband, has a thriving karate dojo; their daughter, Beatrix (Madison Skye), has been accepted into Harvard at the age of ten; and their son Daniel is off solving world hunger in Africa.  I hope that last phrase does not give away too much.  It all frustrates Charlotte because she compares the modesty of her family to the spectacular successes of the Jennings.  Thus, despite repeated invitations from the Jennings, the Sanders are headed to Charlotte’s sister’s house for Christmas.  To get there, Charlotte leaves the plugging into their global positioning system (GPS) of the address to Grant.  Instead of directing them to his aunt’s place, he punches in the Jennings’ residence, and the Sanders head there without checking to see if it is correct.  Charlotte is thus surprised when she knocks on the door of what she assumes is her sister’s new house only to have Jackie answer the door.  Given the advanced hour of the night, she insists that they spend the night.  Reluctantly, Charlotte gives in, and hence begins the awkwardness.  Much of it pertains to the fact that Jackie and Rob used to be in a No Doubt cover band, and dated, with him going so far as to propose.  To make matters worse, Valentino, who they meet in the morning, turns out to be a hunk in Charlotte’s eyes. Yet, they are prevented from leaving by two things.  First, the Sanders’ car is snowed in, though that does not last long since the Jennings have a heated driveway.  The second is Jackie’s overwhelming generosity that wins everyone over, except for Charlotte.  Charlotte thinks there is something off about the Jennings, and sets about going through their Christmas letter in order to prove that it is all fake.  One-by-one, though, she discovers that it is all real.  Unwilling to let it go, she sneaks into the Jennings attic looking for some evidence of the supposed falsehood, and ends up uncovering a Christmas gift for Valentino from Jackie of his grandmother’s reconstructed doll house.  The ruining of this surprise culminates in Charlotte being revealed as the bad guy, particularly when she finds out that Rob has been doing their own version of a Christmas newsletter because he is proud of their family.  Then she breaks the dollhouse.  Despite having come clean with everything, the Sanders are about to leave when Jackie once more shows how forgiving she is and asks that they stay.  To show that there are no hard feelings, Jackie goes with Charlotte to the bank to negotiate for a loan to purchase Rob’s dream home, with Beatrix negotiating the interest rate.  This deal is soon imperiled, however, when the news of Charlotte’s company’s failure is made public.  She is stopped from canceling the deal when her car hits a patch of ice on the way to sign more paperwork, and she is told by an angel that everything will be okay.  This heavenly creature, by the way, is somebody slated to appear in Valentino’s Christmas pageant.  What she is doing out in the middle of nowhere, I have no idea, but I digress.  The same person also lets slip what is wrong in the Jennings household, and that is that Daniel had died.  Now feeling worse than before, Charlotte goes to Jackie to apologize in earnest.  They are together to see Daniel’s dream apparatus, a solar powered hot air balloon (huh?), which is slated to be a part of the pageant.  After Charlotte makes some minor repairs, it takes off, but they accidentally hook the Santa sleigh atop the Jennings’ roof.  This turns out to be fortuitous because Beatrix and Grant had been about to give up their belief in the magical, gift giving creature from the North Pole.  After landing and finishing the show, the movie basically ends, with the end credits showing how each family fared in the future.

Watching Best. Christmas. Ever! is like viewing the work of well-meaning novices.  If it were not for the well-meaning-ness, if you will, then I would be more negative about it.  As it is, it is hard to dislike a movie that is so positive, if schmaltzy at times.  I may not understand why the angel woman happen to be where Charlotte goes off the road in the woods, but it is a small price to pay for a good message.  A slight suggestion to these seeming amateurs would have been to have the main character, Charlotte (I suppose), reach her epiphany later in the proceedings.  It is clear that she is holding on to anger over her life not working out as she had hoped.  To this point, the movie gives us a number of wise, though fortune cookie sounding, words to underscore the need to think differently about her circumstances.  It also sets it in the right time of year to take stock in the blessings that God gives us.  Jackie reminds Charlotte that when God gives us gifts, the best thanks we can give Him is to use them.  Charlotte had not been doing so, opting instead to go to work for a company in which she did not believe rather than pursuing her dreams, or, to put it differently, using her inventiveness for the betterment of society.  While I am not sure that crumb-resistant gloves are the most impactful of devices, it is at least good to see that she understands the error of her ways, eventually.  Jesus’ coming into the world was the fulfillment of all humankind’s wishes, spoken and unspoken, the culmination of our deepest dreams.  As He lay in His manger, people brought Him gifts that spoke to their gratitude for this moment.  Think about this when the calendar turns to December 25^th.  In the meantime, this dovetails well with Jackie’s sentiment.

I appreciate that Best. Christmas. Ever! kept Christ in Christmas, even if it is one of those movies that replaces belief in the Son of God with Santa Claus.  This is done because, I suspect, it is trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible.  Having the pageant, with Mary riding in on a donkey, is something, anyway.  Though I grew impatient with the rest of the material, it is at least inoffensive.