'A Date By Christmas Eve': Lifetime's holiday movie puts a magical online dating spin to Santa's naughty list
'A Date By Christmas Eve' stars Vanessa Lengies and Evan Williams in the roles of Chelsea Simms and Fisher Dougherty, who are neighbors and best friends. Chelsea is your average Christmas movie female lead — she is really nice, selfless, and is often unaware of the feelings the male lead has for her.
While Fisher is pining for her, Chelsea is instead in a relationship with Rod — a self-serving, narcissistic man who seemingly has no interest in Chelsea. We even find out that he is on a dating app while in a relationship with her.
However, this Lifetime Christmas movie puts a spin on Christmas by incorporating the messy 21st Century dating lifestyle into it. Chelsea is a brand strategist for a dating app. For Christmas, she and her colleague Blythe are to pitch an idea for a Christmas upgrade for the app.
When Blythe pitches first, Chelsea realizes that Blythe's pitch is exactly like hers, except for a few small differences. Their boss chooses to carry it forward as if this were an innocent mistake and Chelsea is forced to work with Blythe to roll out the upgrade.
When Chelsea is put in charge of the ad banner which features Santa's wife, she meets Mrs. Kringle who tells her of a special feature of her book — when someone is on the naughty list, she also writes out how they can get back on the nice list — and Chelsea wishes she could do that with her app as well.
And since it's Christmas time, magic is real — and so is Mrs. Kringle — and Chelsea's app can do just that. She picks Rod for her first try and writes that she wants Rod to see how great she is. This completely changes Rod, who starts becoming the attentive boyfriend that she always wanted.
Next, she picks her roommate, Keegan, who she thinks is too needy. She wishes for Keegan to be more independent. Third, she picks Blythe and wishes that Blythe would only tell the truth.
This leads to Blythe revealing that she picked Chelsea's discarded initial sketches and used them for her pitch because she had no confidence in her own. Blythe is then fired and her promotion is instead given to Chelsea.
However, all this gets to Chelsea's head — just around the time she realizes that she has feelings for Fisher. However, since she does not know if Fisher has feelings for her, she wishes for his feelings to be different and this leads to him having no feelings for her at all.
When she realizes that what she has done has consequences and that people are not their true selves, she talks to Mrs. Kringle who tells her to put them back on the good list to reverse the changes.
Thankfully, it's not all for nothing as her roommate, Keegan says she started to be less needy, her former colleague Blythe tells Chelsea that she should not have cheated Chelsea like that and Fisher finally gets together with Chelsea.
As far as Christmas movies go, 'A Date By Christmas Eve' is quite refreshing. Vanessa Lengies gives a good performance as the sweet Chelsea. She and Evan Williams have good chemistry which translates well in the story.
