Stream It or Skip It: ‘The Santa Summit’ on Hallmark, a Romcom Set at a Sober SantaCon

SantaCon comes to Hallmark in the form of The Santa Summit, a holiday movie with three times the romance of the usual Hallmark movie and — weirdly enough — about as much alcohol. Seriously — this is not your frat brother’s SantaCon. This is the Santa Summit, where boundaries are respected and all Santa suits remain surprisingly clean! But does a squeaky clean SantaCon make for a good holiday movie? Or should The Santa Summit have a bit more grit to it?

THE SANTA SUMMIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hunter King (Life in Pieces) plays Jordin, an art teacher who spends time between classes scrolling through her ex’s Instagram and feeling bad. She needs a holiday pick-me-up, and that’s where The Santa Summit comes in! The Santa Summit is essentially SantaCon, but tolerable, respectable, and totally TV-G.

Sidenote: I have no idea what SantaCon’s reputation is outside of New York City, but if you live in NYC and don’t plan on staggering from bar to bar in a cheap Santa suit on SantaCon day, you stay at home. This year’s is December 9th, BTW. You’ve been warned!

Anyway — Jordin isn’t going to go on this bar crawl alone. She enlists her two best friends — Ava (We Wish You a Married Christmas‘ Amy Groening) and Stella (FUBAR’s Stephanie Sy) — to come along for the ride. Math teacher Ava is incredibly down for this; her crush goes to the Santa Summit every year and she’s hoping to score some time with him. Stella, however, is just incredibly down. She had to transition from teaching music to teaching English and she’s not feeling it. Sounds like these three friends could use a big glass of… eggnog. Sure!

The three amigas’ plan to bond over pitchers of dairy products is interrupted before it even begins when a Jordin randomly meets the perfect guy (Virgin River’s Benjamin Hollingsworth). They have everything in common! He’s polite! He’s somehow goofy and insightful! They are also both wearing Santa suits and beards, so neither has any idea what the other looks like and they don’t swap names or numbers. When they get separated, Jordin and Liam (his name is Liam) spend the rest of the Santa Summit trying to reconnect.

Will Jordin and Liam meet up sans beards? Will Stephanie and Ava find their own dream Santas? Will these three friends reconnect with each other, or are they gonna spend all of the Summit chasing down dudes in cheap red suits?! As long as they all keep the eggnog down, I will personally consider this night a victory.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The movie has the pacing and in-over-their-heads feeling of a Game Night, Blockers or, more appropriately, The Night Before. In fact, I could very easily see a version of The Santa Summit that is absolutely in line with those three on every level, including all of the… uh… let’s say mature antics. The premise is right there: trio of semi-estranged besties bond and search for the Santa that got away during the city’s most notorious holiday-themed bar crawl.

Performance Worth Watching: The fact that I found it hard to narrow this down to just one performance should tell you how much fun The Santa Summit really is. I will, however, do my job and single out Erik Athavale (Acting Good) as having the performance worth watching. He takes a very small part, that of a rando in a reindeer costume peddling a “Dasher” cab, and turns it into a pivotal role by believably delivering solid, if blunt, relationship advice. He’s absolutely great, and… I mean, for a second I was low-key rooting for Dasher to end up with Jordin!

Memorable Dialogue: “What don’t I know about masquerade balls?” “Nothing says ‘romance’ like a bunch of randos crammed in a pub.” “Uh, a person said that to you in a five minute conversation?”

A Holiday Tradition: So, the Santa Summit. This is a bar crawl that crawls from pub to Nashville-themed bar with line dancing to an outdoor event space with downhill sledding to a karaoke bar to — I kid you not — a silent disco. A silent disco on Hallmark. If your mom didn’t know about silent discos before, she does now! It’s a big event, populated with what appears to be hundreds of locals and tourists decked out in Santa suits. The extras, they are plentiful! And yes, our heroes do drink along the way, but all of their orders feel very TV-G, very plausible deniability-y. Did they get spiked eggnog or alcoholic ciders? Who’s to say?

Yeah, those drinks look like beers with a lot of head, but they are apple ciders topped with cinnamon whipped cream! No one gets drunk in this movie about an event that is ostensibly SantaCon, but I don’t think Hallmark is ready to show what inevitably happens when hundreds of people in Santa costumes drink gallons of yuletide cheer.

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: It does in that it’s named after the movie’s main event, but “The Santa Summit” sounds way more like the name of a summit of mall Santas deciding upon codes of conduct than anything hip or fun. Ava actually has a great line in the movie where she calls all of the life choices they might make “The Might Before Christmas.” That’s also incredibly vague, but it’s thematically appropriate.

Our Take: I’ll just harp on the obvious for a little bit longer before I start piling on the praise: it is just wild to see a group of millennials on a TV-G bar crawl on the Hallmark channel. These characters, from our lead trio to our manic pixie dream dude (Liam) to his bear-ish older brother (Dan De Jaeger), all feel like they were pulled from New Girl or Happy Endings.

They’re all uniquely funny and uniquely real — and they’re on an adults-only pub adventure that concludes at a silent disco that also has a gingerbread house contest. But this — along with last week’s Never Been Chris’d — is the result of Hallmark pushing past what we expect from Hallmark movies. And instead of casting younger actors and having them — no shade — act twice their age, they’re actually playing characters that feel age appropriate in movies that feel more in touch with today.

And really, no matter how much cognitive dissonance I feel from seeing a sea of people in red and white and not a one of them be falling down drunk, the script and performances make it all okay. As mentioned, everyone in the cast is very good and they all deftly thread the needle of making a Hallmark movie that feels young and also Hallmark-y. Another round of applause for King and Hollingsworth, who essentially have to cram in 84 minutes of romantic chemistry into one five minute conversation — because this is a Hallmark movie where the romantic leads spend next to no time together! We are truly in uncharted territory here, folks.

And that’s what makes The Santa Summit, for all of its TV-G/TV-14 code switching, such an exciting watch. You don’t know where the plot is going. You don’t know where the relationships are going. The only thing you really know is that these actors are game and that there are going to be laughs. Classic Hallmark movies had their own quirks, like how land developers are always eyeing Main Street and how high school crushes always grow up to be hunky woodworkers/mechanics/firemen/etc. A SantaCon where no one gets trashed? That’s just a quirk of a New Hallmark movie.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Santa Summit is in session and your attendance is required.