Tatyana Ali finds love, family, & redemption in ‘Christmas Everlasting’ on Hallmark Channel

I hope you had your Holiday Movie Bingo cards while watching Christmas Everlasting because this movie had it all! Dead parents! Adorable animals! Old flames! Smalltown life! Life-changing inheritance! Holiday baked goods! Ugly Christmas sweaters! (Don’t have your cards yet? Download them here.)

While we get a metric ton of holiday movie tropes, we also get our first Black leads – and primarily Black cast – in a Hallmark movie, holiday or otherwise. I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s a huge step forward for the network and I think it deserves to be noted over and over. Having diverse people in lead roles is important, representation is important, and having POC in Hallmark’s brand of feel-good, traditional holiday movies is important. 

Let’s get to the plot. Lucy (played by Tatyana Ali, a veteran of holiday movies over on Lifetime) is a corporate lawyer in New York City. She’s busy busy busy and doesn’t plan to return to her hometown in Nilson’s Bay, Wisconsin for the holidays, despite her big sister, Alice, inviting her back to the family homestead. Lucy is working on an important case and she’s up for a promotion, easy excuses to stay in NYC. When Lucy gets another call from Alice’s number, she expects it to be her sister trying to convince her to come home again; instead, it’s her Uncle Barney (Dennis Haysbert) calling with the news that Alice passed away in the night.

Lucy is devastated, of course, and goes home for the funeral. We learn then that it’s been 10 or 12 years since Lucy last visited Nelson’s Bay, and that was for her parents’ funerals. We also learn that she didn’t just leave for her career, there’s something in her past that she’s running from. The pieces are slow to come together: for most of the movie we know that Alice was in an accident and somehow it drove Lucy away from Nelson’s Bay, from Alice, from Uncle Barney, and from Peter, her high school boyfriend.

Christmas Everlasting is a drama, no question. We get a bit of humor courtesy of Mr. Freckles, Alice’s cat who is hesitant to accept Lucy’s presence, but this is a dramatic movie meant to pull at all of your heartstrings. Through flashbacks we see Lucy and Alice as young girls and as teenagers, demonstrating their sisterly bond. We also hear from Alice’s friends and practically the entire town that she was beloved, kind, quick to help out her friends and to make new friends, and a devoted animal lover.

There’s a thread of discontent from adult Lucy, however. At first, it seems like a bit of jealousy, a feeling of inferiority because her big sister is so good at everything. Eventually, however, we discover that Lucy’s feelings are more complicated than that. She feels guilty about Alice’s accident. It happened one snowy night when Alice wanted to tell Lucy something important, but Lucy wanted to go hang out with Peter instead. They compromised by agreeing that Alice would pick up Lucy at Peter’s house in a couple of hours. Tragically, it was while Alice was on her way that she was in a car wreck, leaving her with cognitive difficulties. Lucy has carried the guilt ever since.

After Alice’s death, Lucy discovers that she’s left the family home to her younger sister, but only if Lucy lives in the house for four weeks, otherwise it goes to the animal shelter. Lucy is irritated, of course. She has Very Important Work to do in NYC and doesn’t want to stay in Nelson’s Bay through the holidays. Ultimately she decides to stick it out if only so she can sell the house after the four weeks.

I appreciated that this family had an ancestral home; we don’t see that often in media depictions of POC. Here we have a gorgeous home (it’s totally farmhouse chic; Joanna Gaines would approve) set on several acres of land that’s been passed down through three generations of a Black family because of course. We need some conflict about the family home, so here you go!

In the midst of handling Alice’s affairs, Lucy begins to get drawn back into the town’s activities, whether she likes it or not. Peter is her sister’s lawyer so she’s stuck with him. Alice’s friends – FOA: Friends of Alice – are initially a bit chilly, especially Rinda (Shi Ne Jong Nielson) who feels that Lucy neglected her sister. But soon they begin drawing her into their circle, teaching her how to quilt and reminiscing about Alice. Before she knows it, Lucy has friends and a possible romance and a house and a cat.

She also has a cause and a mystery. While exploring the option of selling the house, Lucy discovers that developers are buying up land in Nilson’s Bay with an eye toward building “pre-fab condos” and putting in office buildings where the historic McHenry’s General Store has stood for 75 years. Not on Lucy’s watch! It just so happens that her particular legal niche is property development, although she’s usually working for the developers. But she knows how to find the loopholes and soon rallies the town to fight the impending McMansion-ing of Nilson’s Bay.

In her spare time, Lucy also uncovers a mystery in the form of “Maeve”, a name she finds on tags for more than a dozen quilts Alice made. She asks around but no one seems to know who this Maeve is, although Peter’s responses are borderline evasive, definitely lawyer-y, and I feel like she should’ve picked up on that. 

The Maeve plot is treated as a minor point for most of the movie. It’s a question in the back of Lucy’s mind but not her main focus. Little does she know, Maeve is about to change her life. On the night of Cookiemas, Peter’s mother’s annual cookie-making/ugly Christmas sweater party, Peter finally reveals that he’s known who Maeve was all along but that Alice depended on lawyer-client confidentiality to keep her secret.

Maeve is Alice’s daughter.

Alice got pregnant in college and gave her baby up for adoption, without her family’s knowledge. That was the important thing she wanted to tell Lucy on the night of the accident. Instead, she kept the secret, leaving it to be revealed after her death.

Lucy is stunned and angry with Peter at first, refusing to meet Maeve. But Uncle Barney helps her get past the anger and embrace this member of their family. It’s a very sweet part of the story, meeting Maeve and watching Lucy be so excited to introduce her to Alice’s friends and share stories about her sister with her niece.

I haven’t said much about the romance because it’s also a fairly minor part of the movie. Deondre Whitfield does a fine job as the love interest, a kind man who clearly loved his friend Alice and who clearly still carries a torch for Lucy. The scene where he tells Lucy how he’s always imagined his soulmate…swoon.

Obviously, Lucy and Peter reconcile and share a hot kiss at the end of the movie, but that’s just part of Lucy’s story. Christmas Everlasting is about a woman weighed down by guilt who chose to exile herself from her loved ones rather than deal with it head-on.  Through the power of family and friends and love and small towns and gorgeous houses, she heals and becomes whole again. 

A few odds and ends:

• The little girls who played young Alice and Lucy are The Cutest!
• Patti LaBelle as Peter’s mother was underused. When you have a talent like that, why didn’t we at least get to hear her sing???
• Lucy’s Christmas tree was fully decked in Hallmark ornaments, right? Girl’s got a collection!
• Peter’s fishing hut, all decked out for Christmas, was amazing.
• I loved how the FOA invited themselves over to work on the friendship quilt. “I’ve got a lot of work to do…” “So Thursday is good?”
• Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” should be played in every Christmas movie ever.

Christmas Everlasting premieres Saturday, November 24 at 8/7c on Hallmark Channel.

Get the full line-up of this year’s new holiday movies in our 2018 Holiday Movie Guide. And don’t forget to download your Holiday Movie Bingo cards!