Repeating Christmases, the Joy of Giving, and Everyday Miracles: A faith- based look at two relatively new Christmas movies.

Hello, welcome back to the Nightcrawler Experience! 

First up, a very merry Christmas to everyone! Here, as with the entry I made last month, is an idea I’ve had for quite a while, but have been too busy to put up before today.
I love Christmas, everything about it! I adore Christmas movies and TV specials, of all sorts, both the familiar and well- loved (i.e. ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’), and also the more obscure (i.e. ‘Olive, the Other Reindeer,’ the "Batman: The Animated Series" episode ‘Christmas With the Joker’). They can make me laugh, help me to see the holiday in a new light, and enable me to become a better person in general.
Last year, I came across not one but two that were brand new, and each taught me an important lesson about living for God year- round. Most of you probably haven't heard of either of them, but they're worth a watch.

The first I shall be looking at is a Hallmark Channel movie called ‘Pete’s Christmas.’ As the title suggests, it centers around a boy named Pete (Played by ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’’s Zachary Gordon), the second of three sons, who goes through the worst Christmas ever in his house, in which pretty much everything goes wrong. He’s the only one who doesn’t get a present, he is humiliated at a football game against another family, Christmas dinner is ruined so the family goes to a restaurant to eat and gets food poisoning, and finally the day ends with Pete’s quasi- estranged grandfather (Bruce Dearn) abruptly leaving because he feels unwanted. 

Then, however, similar to the Bill Murray film ‘Groundhog Day,’ Pete finds that this disastrous Christmas keeps repeating itself over and over again. He falls asleep each Christmas night, then when he wakes up, it’s the same Christmas morning all over again. When he gets over the initial shock of this (At first, he thinks his family is pulling a prank on him to somehow punish him for the parts of the ruined Christmas that they have blamed him for), he decides to try and use this, the advance knowledge of what happens, to make things better, initially in rather selfish ways. As time passes, though, and the day keeps repeating, Pete begins realizing that he should use this to help others. He uses the repeating Christmases to better get to know each member of his family and start to see them in a new light, teaches himself to play guitar and uses that to make the day more special for everyone, befriends a lonely girl named Katie (Bailee Madison) who just moved in next door, and finally realizes that he should try and set right all the things that went wrong this Christmas. He uses his knowledge of how the football game unfolds to ultimately become its MVP, ensures that Christmas dinner is saved and proves to be a big hit, and each time learns something new on how to make things better. He eventually comes up with what really needs to be fixed in order to reconcile his family and end the repeating Christmases.

            ‘Pete’s Christmas’ does a marvelous job of driving home the message that it’s better to give than to receive. When Pete first tries to take advantage of the repeating Christmases for his own selfish purposes (i.e. arranging so that he gets a present that originally went to his younger brother but that he had wanted all along, settling a couple scores), he soon finds that this gets boring quick and doesn’t satisfy him. He gets to know each member of his family and Katie, begins to see things from each of their points of view, and finds ways to do right by each of them. As Pete uses his knowledge of how the day unfolds to set things right, you can see how making others happy makes him happy too. As it says in Philippians 2:3-4, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others as better than yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others.” Pete learns this lesson in spades, and you know he will emerge from this whole incident afterwards a much better, kinder person.

Zachary Gordon is quite effective as Pete. You feel for him all throughout the film, and can see the reasoning behind everything he does. Bailee Madison (A young actress I’ve long been a fan of) is very charming and likable as Katie, and also deeply sympathetic when you learn how lonely she is, and the fact that it stems from more than just her being new in town. Bruce Dearn is wonderful as the grandpa, grumpy yet funny and good- hearted deep down, though he can have a hard time showing it. The writing is pretty clever for a Hallmark TV movie, with humor and good character development.

That sums up “Pete’s Christmas.” By Hallmark TV movie standards, it is VERY good and worth a watch to help us learn, as Pete learned in the very end of the film, “Life is like an empty box; It doesn’t matter what you get out of it, what matters is what you put into it.”

The second is a film which came out in theaters, but only on a limited release. It is a film called ‘The Christmas Candle,’ based on a book by renowned Christian author and pastor Max Lucado.

This film takes place in 1890, in an English village named Gladbury, in which one of the local landmarks is a family- owned candle shop with a fascinating legend to it. Every 25 years, on the first night of Advent, an angel visits the shop and blesses a single candle there. Then, whoever lights that particular candle on Christmas Eve and says a prayer after doing so will receive a miracle.

Into this village comes a new pastor, Rev. David Richmond (Hans Matheson). He doesn’t have a lot of faith in divine intervention and miracles, preferring instead to motivate others to act as God’s hands and feet to those in need, to be their miracle. He’d very much follow the philosophy of “Be the change you want to see.” As you can guess, he isn’t impressed with the story of the Christmas Candle. He quickly clashes with many of the townspeople as a result, and especially with the candle- shop owner (Sylvester McCoy, best known for playing the hippie wizard Radaghast the Brown in the “Hobbit” films), who is himself going through some family troubles.

When David learns about some of the miracle- requests that the townspeople may have if they should get the Christmas candle (Everything from a woman whose house has a wall in need of repair, to a mute boy who wishes to be able to speak, to a rather homely woman who wishes to get a husband in time for Easter, among others), he tries his hardest to find ways of meeting their needs directly, either through his own personal actions or through encouraging other townspeople to help them. David finds an ally in a lovely yet skeptical young woman named Emily (Samantha Barks, best known for playing Eponine in the 2012 ‘Les Miserables’ film), and together they seek to help bring Gladbury into the modern age, both through the pastor’s teachings that people should try to help shine God’s light to others through their own good deeds rather than through hoping in the Christmas candle or other divine intervention, and also through him making a controversial decision to install electric lights in the church at a time when electric lights were a relatively new and at times mistrusted invention. By the end of the film, the Christmas candle is lit, the miraculous and human collide, many miracles come to pass, and the village of Gladbury has probably the single most memorable Christmas in its entire history.

‘The Christmas Candle’ is a very good film, especially by Christian movie standards. The performances are all great, especially Matheson, McCoy, Barks, and a nice breakout role from renowned singer Susan Boyle as one of the townspeople. The writing is great, including drama, inspiration, and a good amount of humor as well. The scene in which the Angel appears in the candle shop to bless the candle is stunning. Considering that Christian films generally don’t have the budget for very impressive special effects, they make do very well with making this scene visually beautiful. The changes and arcs that each of the major characters go through over the course of the film all fit very well and make a lot of sense. The only minor issue I have with the film is that it’s a shame we don’t hear Samantha Barks sing much in the movie. She showed in ‘Les Miserables’ that she can be a quite talented singer, but in this, the only time she sings is in the very end, when she and the rest of the cast together perform the quite beautiful song ‘Miracle Hymn,’ and even then, it’s largely Susan Boyle whose voice steals the scene.

This film has absolutely wonderful theological messages. It deals with how Christians should balance their trust in God to work miraculous things through divine intervention with their own responsibilities on Earth and how God has called them to do His work on Earth through their own actions of kindness and love. That is a very important message for us as Christians to keep in mind, finding an appropriate balance between the two. Trusting in God’s providence and working to help those around us who are in need are both bedrock elements of the Christian faith. Just one or the other isn’t good for a whole lot, as seen in Ephesians 2:8-9 and James 2:14- 26, but through both of them together, truly extraordinary things may be done for God’s Kingdom.
So, there we have ‘The Christmas Candle,’ a marvelous Christmas film which I believe will become part of my traditional holiday viewing.
That’s all for this edition of ‘The Nightcrawler Experience.’ See you next time, merry Christmas, happy New Year, and God bless you all!