Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa
It's that time of year my friends, where me and my partner in crime watch some Hallmarky Holiday romance movies and discuss said movies. For whatever reason, be it the state of the world or a lack of desire to watch the same damn movie over and over again, my heart just isn't in it this year like it usually is. But I owe it to you! My people! So I must soldier on. This year, in the year of our Lord 2022, the movie selection process is a little different. Since I don't have the wherewithal to choose which movie to watch, so I compiled a list of Holiday movies that I have access to, which is close to a thousand (!), dumped this list in an Excel spreadsheet, wrote a simple formula and had the universe randomly choose for me. The first movie the Universe chose for me was actually Christmas in Evergreen: Bells are Ringing, but since I did watch the first one of these some years ago, and since I have an inability to watch things out of order, despite the fact that the order in which one watches this series affects nothing, I had to make the executive call to watch Letters to Santa.
We open with Lisa (Jill Wagner) and her bestie Oliver (Andrew Francis) just finishing a job. I wish I could tell you exactly what they do, I think it's staging small stores or something? With their ultimate goal being to have their own store to stage? None of it really makes sense to me, but as long as it helps Lisa find a man at the end of this movie, that's all that matters.
Lisa's Christmas plans are to spend the holidays in her childhood town of Evergreen Vermont, as opposed to spending it with her parents who are in Europe and clearly don't care about their daughter. So while her parents are technically alive, I think they are dead to her, though that's not explicitly stated.
While driving to Evergreen she sees some man pulled over on the road in that Evergreen Magical Red Truck, so she pulls over to help this dude. This guy would be the roguishly handsome, constantly grinning Kevin (Mark Deklin), and with Lisa's help they manage gets that love connecting jalopy started. This is the beginning of Kevin and Lisa constantly running into each other in town.
Now safely in Evergreen, Lisa stops at the diner we are so familiar with run by Mrs. Shaw, (Barbara Niven), meets some of the holdovers from the last movie, and observes that across the street is Daisy's candy store, that she remembers so fondly as a child, is closed and in a bit of disrepair. She asks Mrs. Shaw 'Where's Daisy?'. Come on girlfriend, Daisy was like a hundred in those flashbacks of you when your were six. She's totally dead baby. The problem we have is if the mayor doesn't sell the store to a worthy buyer before Christmas, Home Depot or Whataburger or some other garbage chain store is going to move in and completely wreck Evergreen. Do you know anybody who knows how to stage stores? I do! That chick right there named Lisa! Lisa needs to know if there's anybody in town who knows how to fix stuff. I know a guy! That perpetually grinning dude right there named Kevin! And now the love games begin.
Real quick though, the Letters from Santa part of the title comes from the Santa Mailbox is Daisy's store, which they found a 25 year old letter that never made it to the North Pole and they all proceeded to violate the authors privacy and read it out loud. It was some sad letter about something or another, but the important part is that it was written by young Kevin in 1993 who was sad about the tragic death of his mother (murder maybe? Definitely murder).
There's a ton of other stuff going on in this movie not related to Lisa and Kevin's love thing, like Principal Michelle (Holly Robinson Peete) hooking up with Flower Store owner Hannah's brother, Some kid being given a skeleton key and and tasked with sticking it in every lock in Evergreen trying to see which door it opens, knowing full well in reality if he did this the police would shoot him dead, and Kevin is also trying to reconnect with his distant dad who may or not have killed his mom. I'm inferring this. Filling in the blanks.
So Lisa and Kevin are clearing falling each other, complete with the first of THREE near miss kisses, when Lisa's bestie, Oliver, comes down to help them finish the store. This is important because we know something needs to break these two up, and that would be Kevin thinking Oliver to be Lisa's boyfriend. A few scenes later, Lisa assures him that this is not the case. Oliver is clearly gay, but it would seem in the olden days of Hallmark, way back in 2018, they didn't feel comfortable actually labeling a character as gay so they brainstormed a way to tell the audience a man is gay without actually calling him gay. Ding! Make him a former professional figure skater! They're all gay, right? Problem solved and the path to love is back on.
Until it's derailed yet again. Lisa and Oliver show the store to one of their clients who instead of buying the store offers the two stagers good jobs back in Boston. Kevin over hears the offer and sulks off, yet again, thinking Lisa is heading to Boston but of course she's not. Our girl is taking over Daisy's store so she can stage it over and over again, or something. Thus she has to track down Kevin's wishy washy weak ass and assure him that she will be in town and that the love can continue. That guy Holly Robinson Peete's character was kicking it with didn't have any of these debilitating self doubt issues, and he landed his fist kiss, no near miss there. But then I don't think his mom was murdered by his dad when he was a kid, so there's that. I'm inferring this. I'm just saying Lisa might want to think about her man choice is all. Regardless, they finally get to kiss, amidst the ringing bells and snow, and all is well in Evergreen... at Christmas.
As I said in our discussion about the first Christmas in Evergreen movie, these are the prototype of the Hallmarky Romantic Movie, and Letters to Santa is no different as it checks all the required boxes. One character is a Christmas loving psycho, while another is somewhat indifferent, due to his dead mom. We have cookie baking, Christmas tree trimming, magic in the form of that wishing snow globe, lots of canned Christmas music playing throughout, cocoa drinking, plenty of clearly fake snow including a completely computer generated snowfall at the end, a dead mom, caroling, near miss kisses, a cute kid, and Santa was back from the last movie eerily appearing from literally nowhere to dispense wisdom and then disappearing like vapor, which for reasons I don't understand didn't freak anybody out.
Jill Wagner makes for a fine, energetic heroine and is just as lovely today as was when she was trying to force me to buy a Mercury fifteen years ago, and she is NOT Tricia Hefler.
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| Not Tricia! |
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| Not Jill! |
Mark Deklin makes a perfectly fine hero, who as it turns out is not Canadian, which I didn't think was allowed in these movies, and the rest of cast is constructed of Hallmark / Lifetime veterans who are keenly aware of exactly what kind of movie they are in.
Is the movie any good? I mean, probably not. 'Raging Bull' is a good movie, but who wants to watch 'Raging Bull' over and over again? I know I don't. But I do know that folks who like these movies will certainly like this one because it doesn't deviate from formula one little bit, and we are okay with that. Maximum Vomits!
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