Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Christmas Blessing’ on Great American Family, Which Proves You Can (Food) Bank On Lori Loughlin

Great American Family’s holiday offerings continue with A Christmas Blessing, an old-fashioned holiday romance movie starring Lori Loughlin and James Tupper. This is actually the second Loughlin/Tupper romance to air on Great American Family in 2023, following January’s Fall Into Winter. However, this is Loughlin’s first holiday movie since Hallmark’s Homegrown Christmas in 2018 — a movie she starred in with Victor Webster, who appears in this weekend’s Hallmark movie Mystery on Mistletoe Lane. The world of holiday TV movies just gets smaller as the genre’s popularity gets bigger.

A CHRISTMAS BLESSING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lori Loughlin (Fuller House) plays celebrity chef Mandy Gilmore. She’s just retired from twelve years hosting A World of Food and what’s she gonna do? Write a book about her experiences traveling the world and eating at every restaurant with 3 Michelin stars. First, though, Mandy has some unfinished business to take care of in Milwaukee. It turns out that Mandy’s aunt willed her food bank to Mandy upon her passing, and now Mandy has to do something about this big empty kitchen. Her solution: sell it to the courier business next door, the one run by the handsome-yet-goofy Adam (Ride’s James Tupper). Should be easy enough, right?

This is a holiday movie, so of course there’s a complication! Upon arriving at Angel’s Fare food bank, Mandy runs into Otto (Batwoman’s Jesse Hutch). A well-dressed gentleman with an AirPod perpetually in his ear, Otto has arrived to volunteer at Angel’s Fare as he has in years past. He’s surprised to learn that the food bank won’t open this year, and therein lies the problem for Mandy. Is she really gonna close down her aunt’s food bank right before Christmas, giving no notice to all of the people who have relied on it year after year? Mandy’s trip to Paris can wait, because she’s got to give Angel’s Fare one last hurrah.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is technically a spoiler, but there is one holiday movie that you can feel A Christmas Blessing trying to evoke. Whether it succeeds, well, that’s your call.

Performance Worth Watching: Whatever your opinion on Lori Loughlin is after the last few years of headlines and her return to TV via GAF, you gotta admit: she’s great as the lead of a holiday TV movie.

Memorable Dialogue: Here is essentially every line of dialogue from Otto: “I have a personal philosophy that time [pulls out pocket watch] really has no meaning, right? However — love, grace, beauty, the Christmas spirit, well, that does.”

A Holiday Tradition: Angel’s Fare food bank is open every Christmas, and that includes this Christmas — even if it’s to be the last one.

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: Forget sense, what about good SEO? Not only is this not the first movie titled A Christmas Blessing, it’s not even the only movie titled A Christmas Blessing to come out this year. The other one beat this one’s debut by a few weeks (and you can stream it for free on Tubi). Why GAF changed it from its original — yet equally generic — title Blessings of Christmas is a mystery.

Our Take: If you spend too much time analyzing ratings and website profiles, you probably come away with a very strong idea of the difference between a Great American Family holiday movie and a Hallmark holiday movie. This juxtaposition was a big deal during last year’s round of holiday movies, but hasn’t been as big a part of the narrative in 2023 — other than Great American Media president Bill Abbott clarifying that Candace Cameron Bure is not a spokesperson for the network. Still, it wasn’t that long ago that seemingly everyone with a passing interest in these holiday movies was googling to see which star had “defected” from which network. Let me tell you: it is wild to think about all that drama while watching A Christmas Blessing.

Lori Loughlin’s return to holiday form essentially picks up where she left off in 2018, in that A Christmas Blessing feels like a Hallmark movie from 2018. And I don’t mean that it’s missing all the queer characters and left-leaning politics and woke agenda that actually has not proliferated across the Hallmark networks. I mean that A Christmas Blessing strictly adheres to the one thing that Hallmark has actually changed: the formula. This is not a movie that you watch for surprises. It’s not even the kind of holiday movie that you need to pay close attention to. If you’ve watched enough of these kinds of movies to actually be invested in behind-the-scenes drama, then you will be able to map out the entire movie’s plot during the first act break.

Similar to how modern Hallmark movies aren’t socialist propaganda, this Great American Family movie doesn’t even have the overt conservatism that so many ascribe to the network’s holiday movie lineup after reading some headlines. This movie is exactly as religious as some modern Hallmark movies, in that there is a Bible verse and, uh, see the spoiler in “What Movies Will It Remind You Of?” This movie could air on Hallmark exactly as-is, albeit probably in 2018 considering that a lot of Hallmark’s modern lineup keeps you guessing.

All that being said, A Christmas Blessing would probably just be a middle-of-the-road entry, even back in the recent past when holiday movies weren’t pushing boundaries in regards to genre and humor. At its best, A Christmas Blessing is a perfectly average holiday movie, but it’s average in a way that now seems unsurprising and ultimately unspectacular.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A Christmas Blessing would actually be worth a watch (or hate-watch) if it was anywhere near as extreme as people make Great American Family movies to be.