HALLMARK CHANNEL MOVIE: Every Christmas Has a Story Review

In Los Angeles, popular morning show TV host Kate Harper (Lori Loughlin from the Hallmark Channel series When Calls the Heart) isn’t exactly a fan of Christmas, but her viewers were unaware of that fact until an accidentally on-camera flub puts her dislike for the holiday in the forefront of everyone who watches her show.

Kate is also put at the mercy of the big boss, Lauren Foster, as well as her show’s advertisers. The solution is to send her to the small town of Hollyvale, North Dakota – the biggest little Christmas town in the country, which invited her to their “neck of the woods” to find her Christmas spirit.

Joining Kate for this trip, albeit reluctantly – as they both had other plans for the week of Christmas – is Kate’s producer Jack Brewster (Colin Ferguson from the TV show Eureka). As it turns out, Kate and Jack were college sweethearts. According to Kate, they dated for three years and then they both got jobs – Jack on the East Coast and Kate in Albuquerque. When the long-distance relationship didn’t work out, Jack moved on and married someone else.

Many years later, though, Jack is now single and working as the producer on Kate’s show. That’s not awkward at all, right? Nor is it awkward that they are stuck in Hollyvale, trying to find a way to not only fix her image but also, at least for Kate, track down the mystery of why the much beloved and fondly remembered Christmas tree placed in the center of town is no longer provided by Vernon Hollis (Willie Aames of Eight is Enough and Charles in Charge fame), an ancestor of the town’s founder.

As Jack and Kate spend time in the small town, getting to know and interview its residents, it is clear that Jack has not gotten over Kate and that Kate is very much like Nancy Drew when it comes to solving the mystery of why the Hollis tree stopped coming to the town. In fact, Kate has enlisted Hollyvale Inn employee Mia Walker – a journalism student – to help her track down Vernon Hollis.

Thanks to a bit of mischievous investigating Kate discovers an address for Vernon, setting her and Jack on a quest to track the man down, which they do. And they find him in a beautiful, right-out-of-a-storybook-like log cabin home in the middle of nowhere; and in doing so, they learn that due to his beloved wife’s death three years earlier, he stopped sending the tree to Hollyvale.

In the end, though, Kate’s reasoning with Vernon about keeping the tradition of the tree alive in order to honor his late wife Amanda, finds him and the yearly tree returning to town; Kate finding her way back to Christmas (after the reveal that it was because her father – who left a then 7-year-old Kate and her mother alone – was the real reason for her dislike of the holiday); and Jack and Kate rekindling their long-ago romance.

Every Christmas Has a Story is just one of nearly 20 holiday-themed movies to debut throughout the holiday season on the Hallmark Channel; and is just one in a long line of wonderfully delightful movies that families can enjoy watching (and rewatching) together.

PS: Did anyone notice that the Hollyvale Town Hall is actually the same building used as the courthouse in the Hallmark Channel now defunct series Cedar Cove?