Oh Hallmark, I can’t even tell you all the ways that I LOVE Next Stop, Christmas. I really loved it so much that I have watched it four times since it premiered.
That’s a miracle, being as I have about 50 Christmas movies to watch and I should be doing that. But when you find a movie that fills you with so much holiday cheer, you don’t deny yourself that joy.
And trust – I am a grinch – so it is a miracle that I love doing this at all. But there is something about holiday movies, the way that they bring some sense of hope that keeps me coming back to this every year.
Living in New York, I know what it means for life to always be on the go. When you live here, you are working all the time. It’s not only because you need to in order to pay the bills, it’s just the way that things are. It feels like you live to work here, not work to live. And so sometimes it’s easy to forget what the reality of life is.
It’s not that New York is a bad place to live. It is the best place to live. New York is place that reminds you what it’s like to be alive, to feel everything and feel it deep. You find parts of yourself that you didn’t know could exist. You let go of parts of you that you didn’t need.
But then again, you also can get lost.
There are so many people that I know in New York who have dated a celebrity of some caliber. But we don’t talk about it. It’s one of those things that seems to just be. And this movie – well it’s about that… kinda.
In the movie, “Angie wonders what life would be like if she had married an ex who became famous. When she finds herself magically transported into the past, Angie has the chance to relive that Christmas and learn what (and who) is truly important to her.”
And that’s the thing. We’re all left with “what ifs” lately. What if I had done this or that? The truth is, we’ll never know about the what ifs in life and maybe that’s why I really love movies that explore the what ifs in life.
Angie is set to spend a week by herself in Yonkers (no comment on why anyone would want to go there), when she buys a mysterious ticket. She thinks it’s a holiday promotion, but once she boards and falls asleep, she is magically transported to another train. It’s like The Polar Express, only not. It’s a train taking her home with the “celebrity” that she wonders if she should have said yes to.
But she quickly realizes that it isn’t a matter of saying yes to him and it’s not a matter of saying no. It’s a matter of setting her life priorities straight.
With each time she returns back to the train and then back to her hometown, little things change. But there is a constant – Angie is fighting for her parents to reconnect and to fall in love again. She’s realizing that she doesn’t know her sister and all of the issues that she is having.
Angie has her best friend to rely on and tells him that she’s from the future. He makes fun, but quickly realizes that she’s telling the truth.
Ben doesn’t like her fiance (that’s right, in one scene she says yes) and he realizes that she’s not too sure about it either. Ben doesn’t want to tell her how he feels, because I think he wants her to realize that she loves him.
However, the thing about life is while we’re waiting for people to realize how they feel about us, we run the risk of loosing them. We run the risk of them not seeing the way that we fit together with them. I get the idea of taking the risk, because what is life without taking risks?
The celebrity that Angie was dating – he doesn’t take seriously the same things that she does. And that is a big warning sign. If you can’t trust the person that you are going to spend the rest of your life with to put some emphasis on the same priorities as you do, that’s a huge red flag.
Especially if their reason is only to put themselves first. That doesn’t work. It’s just something that is a red flag. You need someone who is going to put you first and if they can’t, at the very least compromise.
And the only person that puts Angie first is Ben. She’s rarely seen that or acknowledged it, but everyone else can see it. It’s only when she breaks up with her boyfriend and her sister gives her a letter that Ben had written a long time ago.
A letter that professed his love for her. And that’s when the train comes and shows up to get her. She’s figured out the way to get back to her time, but what that means is leaving Ben without being able tell him face to face how she feels.
But she was able to tell him over the phone that she loved him and in 10 years to meet her at a certain place.
Only she ends up running later than she is supposed to be there, as she was called into surgery.
You can see how much Angie loves Ben, when she thinks she’s missed him. But of course he’s sitting there, waiting for her. He’s always been waiting for her and doesn’t care if he has to wait longer.
The way that Lyndsy Fonseca and Chandler Massey are on the screen, you are cheering for these two to be paired up in more Hallmark movies. Their characters of Angie and Ben are meant to be and you just find it all to be believable. Hallmark did a great job with this casting.
You can’t look away from the chemistry that these two have. Hell you stand up and cheer when Ben gets down on one knee and proposes marriage.
From the beginning you know that Angie and Ben are meant to be and you’re cheering for them. The little looks that they share, the sentences that they finish, the way that they laugh and move in sync. It’s just a cute movie, but it’s the casting that makes it a movie that you can watch over and over.
Next Stop, Christmas is fun and introspective ride. I will be heading to Grand Central to buy a ticket to Yonkers, hoping it will lead me to the love that I overlooked. A girl can dream, can’t she?