5/5 Great heartwarming story to watch over and over
  by Donald F. Chisholm
My wife and I previously watched this movie on the Hallmark Channel and decided that we needed a DVD to watch it whenever we so desired.

This was the first DVD we have had the time to watch of the 6 that we purechased. It is a great DVD to enjoy, the one we purchased has a couple of flaws in the DVD near the beginning. It is not a perfect DVD.

4/5 Cheestastic Christmas movie
  by Lizz A. Belle (North Bend, OR United States)
ABC Family usually puts out some pretty good Christmas movies and this one is no exception. I call it "cheestastic" because it is predictable but the story is fun nonetheless. My biggest problem with the movie was the actors. I am a fan of Candace Cameron-Bure from her days on Full House, but she almost doesn't look like the same person in this movie. She appears to have had quite a bit of plastic surgery, as you will notice because her face never moves. There is a part where she is clearly supposed to scowl/give a dirty look to the villain of the movie and when she turns to do this, her eyes give a cold stare but the rest of her face doesn't follow. I found her lack of emotional responses to be quite amusing, which I think detracted from the story.

The story is very cute, following a bit along the lines of a Charlie Brown Christmas. CCB's father runs a "resort" if you will in a small town in Vermont (look for the sign on the wall in Santa's Workshop) called "Santaville" that runs 365 days a year. When CCB is younger, business is booming as people still enjoy the magic of Christmas and kids are still asking for things like ponies and dollhouses instead of X-box 360s and Guitar Hero. However, as Charlie Brown says, Christmas becomes too commerical and the business in Santaville dries up. CCB's father, played by Tom Arnold (who lacks the usual no-nonsense abrasiveness I loved about him in True Lies) has been neglecting his bills due to lack of income waiting for a Christmas miracle. CCB returns to the town very reluctantly after her father is injured in a sleighing accident. She has become the cynical Scrooge figure one might expect after having her entire childhood swirled around 24/7/365 Christmas. There is the usual romantic faire and the predictable evil villian who swoops in to try to take Santaville from the family but it has the Christmas happy ending everyone cherishes (and I would have been royally angry if it didn't).

I can't say this is a Christmas film I will be watching every year, but I am not sorry I added it to my library. It is an enjoyable movie suitable for families with a refreshing course on the true meaning of Christmas. Money well spent.

5/5 FULL OF CHRISTMAS SPIRIT
  by D. Mundy
This is a great family film-heard one bad word,,but other than that it is wonderful and it will become a must see film each year.It has alot of good morals in it about family and love.You should see this with your family.We thought the acting was great and we will hope for more films like it.

4/5 Just a little Christmas fun...
  by C. Lorz (Orem, UT USA)
This is hardly the best Christmas movie I've ever seen. There were some horribly awkward parts that will always bug me (the two kids who played the younger versions of CC-B's & CW's characters were painfully bad actors). And yeah, the nutcrackers were a hard sell, but over all it had what most people look for in a Christmas movie, and that is Christmas. It had a quiet charm that I found endearing and over all I enjoyed it.

2/5 Consider yourself warned!
  by J. Olsen (UT, United States)
My apologies to Candace Cameron-Bure, because I really like her, but this movie was so lame. I have dozens of Christmas movies, and my daughter recorded this and several others last Christmas and let me watch them. I still have a hard time believing anyone thought this one would fly.
Candace plays a young woman who grew up as her father's (Tom Arnold) right-hand man in "Santaville". He was Santa and she was his elf. She couldn't even call him "dad" because Santa doesn't have children, just elves.
Later, as a work-aholic adult, she takes a break from her job in the city and returns home when her dad gets in an accident and needs help. She finds Santaville in deep financial trouble and her dad in denial over the whole thing.
Thinking she is helping her dad keep Santaville, she signs a contract with a slimy character who is so obvious in his sinister role that if he had a moustache you would expect him to start twirling the ends of it. She has actually just sold out to developers.
The knight in shining armor in all of this is a quiet young man working for her dad--someone she had met briefly years ago, but has now forgotten. He all but works for free, since there isn't enough money to go around and he seems to get by. He spends his spare time puttering in the workshop and just when things look their darkest, his supposedly amazing handmade nutcrackers come to the rescue, selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars--saving Santaville and putting it back on the map.
It is hard for me to believe that the people who put this together actually thought the items they used to represent his amazing nutcrackers would even pass as nutcrackers, let alone amazing enough to sell for the sums they claim. Other family members who viewed this felt the same way.
I really wanted to like this movie because I liked the main characters, but the acting wasn't always up to par and when they started having everyone go crazy over these wooden dolls that could have been made in junior high shop class, that was the last straw.
I don't expect Christmas movies to be realistic--after all, we are talking about Christmas time when magic is in the air, but I do expect some measure of believability within the "Christmas" framework. If that is not important to you and you just want another Christmas movie to add to your collection, this one at least will probably not offend you with anything inappropriate. Your whole family can watch it together, but I can't guarantee that they will enjoy it.