Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Christmas Under The Lights’ on Hallmark Mystery, About A Woman From The Big City Who Returns To Her Family Farm To Run The Christmas Carnival Her Mom Started

Hallmark Mystery’s Christmas Under The Lights takes absolutely every theme, every stereotypical trope we’ve come to expect from a Hallmark movie, and throws it all together in one film. A woman from the big city returns to her charmingly rustic hometown where everyone calls her out for her city ways and she rolls her eyes at their hokey, country livin’. But pretty soon, she starts to fall for one of those country bumpkins (who, it turns out, is actually a respected artist who moved away from the city himself in search of a more meaningful life!), and together, they do a Country X City Collab to turn her dead mother’s holiday fair into the twinkliest Christmas carnival you can imagine to honor her legacy.

CHRISTMAS UNDER THE LIGHTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s 1999 and a young girl attending a Christmas carnival watches the woman who’s running it welcome everyone there with open arms. The girl seemingly makes a mental note as if to say, “Some day, that will be me.”

The Gist: That girl is Emily, and in the present day, she has grown into a full-blown event planner played by Heather Hemmens. And that woman she was looking up to was her mother. But her mom has passed away and that means there’s no one to run the annual Christmas carnival that she founded at their family farm anymore. Emily’s brother Nick (Antonio Cayonne), who now runs their mom’s farm that houses an assortment of animal rescues, ask Emily to come run the holiday carnival and she’s quick to say no now that she’s a big shot in the city. Eventually, she has a change of heart when she remembers how much the carnival meant to her mom.

Emily flies from L.A. to the woodsy outskirts of Seattle where their family ranch is, and when she’s driving into town, she practically runs over her brother’s friend Luke (Marco Grazzini), who has been living in their guest house and helping out with the animals. Luke initially comes off as a little country (denim, flannels, beard scruff) which puts him at odds with Emily who is as cosmopolitan as they come (high heels, oat milk in her espresso) but when Emily learns Luke is a well-respected artist, she asks if he’d help create some light installations for the carnival. Pretty soon they realize they don’t actually come from different worlds at all, and that they share in common the fact that they’ve both been running from their pasts.

Throughout the movie, we’re shown flashbacks of Emily as a teen, her difficult relationship with her mom, the ranch, her life in the country. This is a person who was born to live in a city and she’s wary, if not resentful of the fact that her mom moved her out to this farm against her wishes as a kid. The flashbacks are enough of an indicator to tell us all of this, but the film punctuates Emily’s persona with several scenes of her getting sassed by the locals for being in a rush or being dressed up or not pausing to wish someone Merry Christmas. These flashbacks seem to haunt Emily and some of them are emotional, reminding Emily of everything she left behind and how she wishes she would have been there more for her mother. This relationship is at the heart of the film, even more than her budding relationship with Luke, but ultimately, he’s the one who gets her to see that, in the same way that we can still see the light from a dying star millions of miles away, we can still feel the energy of people we’ve lost, absorbed in all we see and do.

Our Take: Written by Russell Hainline (Hot Frosty), Christmas Under The Lights is a nice holiday romance, and I’ll be the first to call out the fact that, unlike most Hallmark movies, this one shows some skin (a whole exposed six pack!) and makes a few references to getting frisky (Luke offers to give Emily a massage, she talks about him being good with his hands… by normal standards on the channel, this kind of talk feels truly scandalous), but beyond that, this film falls into the “sweet but generic” category.

The leads are attractive, the setting is beautiful, and the characters all have a backstory that helps give them some dimension, but what it comes down to is that while everyone is warm and kind, no one has any real personality beyond their broadly drawn “city mouse-country mouse” descriptions. As someone who has watched well over a dozen Countdown to Christmas movies so far this year alone, I tend to go on instinct when judging these films. If I find my mind wandering midway through the movie, as it did while I watched this one, I can’t help but feel like it’s missing a jolt of energy or excitement that sets it apart.

Christmas Under The Lights is by no means a bad film, but it’s also not exactly a memorable one in the pantheon of Christmas romances. Except for the abs. I will always remember the abs.

Parting Shot: It’s the Christmas Carnival. Emily, having just welcomed everyone to the big event in a scene that mimics her mother doing the same thing in the first scene, reunites with Luke. He tells her he just came back from a day trip to Seattle where he rented out an artist studio for himself and he placed a hold on an office for her to start her own marketing firm. It’s the best of both of their worlds, a perfect melding of their city-country lives. THEN THEY KISS.

Performance Worth Watching: Luke, played by Marco Grazzini, is a sensitive and humble artist whose mind is as attractive as his body; the type of man who you can bounce ideas and quarters off of.

Memorable Dialogue: “I thought you were a lot less… city,” Luke says to Emily when the meet. “I thought you were a lot less… farm-y,” she responds. Are city and farm-y really accurate ways to generalize people? I guess when you’re trying to set up an opposites-attract romance, yes.

Our Call: While there’s a lot I liked about Christmas Under The Lights, especially Emily’s emotional arc as she makes peace with her relationship with her mother, ultimately it’s not a film that stands out in the pantheon of great holiday films. SKIP IT.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.