The movie begins with two happy girls enjoying winter, snow, family, and Christmas. We see them growing up, and, perhaps oddly, at one point burying one of the girl's favourite dolls, a pretty string-puppet, in a large tin can. A time-capsule? The parents are helping with the burial in the snow, and it seems a bit of a joke. (The voice-over narrative was not clear in these early scenes.) But later this contributes a key moment in the whole story.
Then we see the younger sister, who has just graduated from high school, about to get married. The older sister, waiting to be the chief bride's maid, happens to see the groom misbehaving with another bride's maid, and when she tries to warn her sister, but can't stop the wedding, she walks out!
Now the real story begins, five years after Kate (Carly McKillip) walked out of her younger sister Melanie's (Britt McKillip) wedding, marrying her high school sweetheart straight after finishing high school. This wedding-rift has torn the family apart!
(In real life, sisters Carly and Britt McKillip are Canadian musicians who sing and perform together in the group called One More Girl, in a country and western pop gospel style. Later we hear, and see, Kate-Carly singing a gospel-tinged version of "O, Holy Night", while pretending to play the piano. The father in the movie is played by George Canyon, a successful Canadian country and western singer and actor, and he sings the final song, his own composition, "Home for Christmas" with the girls and another character.)
With the sisters not talking and living separately, their parents (Amy Jo Johnson, George Canyon) are struggling emotionally, and financially. The father lost his job in the economic recession, and the mother has started a small pre-school child care centre to pay the bills. (The pre-school children are compensations for losing contact with her estranged daughters.)
When the father buys a puppy on a whim, and the pre-school children are allergic to dogs, it is all too much, and the parents argue and split up.
Because the father had been out of work, they could not make the mortgage repayments and had put their big family home up for sale. The family home is eventually bought by Mike (Ben Hollingsworth), a handsome single ex-Marine (with a personal secret) who served in Iraq, and whose best friend died in Iraq. The friend's young son hasn't coped well with his father's death, so Mike has offered him a job in his new carpentry and repair shop, and tries to provide substitute-fatherly guidance. (Later his friend's attractive widow appears in the story, complicating matters for a while, ...)
Meanwhile Kate has found her dream job as a book editor in a thriving publishing company. However the sentimental family story she is now editing does not correspond to her own experiences of family problems and breakings up, and she is struggling with a pre-Christmas deadline to publish the book.
At this point, everybody is estranged and bitter. Melanie is hiding the fact that her faithless husband has left her, leaving her alone, unqualified for any job, and forced to paying her bills by selling off the expensive furniture eventually she is reduced to living in an almost empty house!
When Kate finds out that her parents have separated, and her mother has been torn by regret, and every day drives to look at the old family home while it was still for sale, Kate visits the home, herself, meets Mike, and then tries to reunite the family at the old house for Christmas. Coincidentally, some of the family's old Christmas decorations are still in boxes in the attic of the family house.
All of this leads to a series of mishaps, misunderstandings, and small on-going hints of romance developing between Mike and Kate.
Moreover, the family used to spend Christmas evenings sitting around singing and playing piano and guitar. Kate is, or was, a song-writer. Mike tells her she is lucky to have experienced happy family life family Christmases. He says, without detail, that he came from a big family, but, he adds, "it's complicated". Surprisingly, he never experienced a family Christmas, ...
The ending is predictable and happy for everyone: young romance, and estranged parents reunited, and angry sisters reconciled, ... and a puppy!
This is not a great Christmas film, and Christmas is no more than the focus for a very happy annual family get-together. But it is a pleasant and thoroughly plausible story, capably acted, and sung, and with likeable characters who seem ordinary folk, with some talent, rather than unrealistically handsome Hollywood stars. They are always sincere.
It is thoroughly re-watchable, which is a good criterion for judging Christmas, and other, movies!
