Mitch (Robin Dunne) is a DJ at a college radio station in Harrison; Maggie (Brooke Nevin) is his assistant (or so it seems, since, like many plotpoints in this movie, their working relationship is never made clear). It's Christmas Eve and Maggie needs a ride home, so Mitch, who loves Christmas thanks to his Christmas-loving mom, offers to take her. When they wind up stuck on the highway, he takes a detour into a small town and promises to give her the best Christmas ever. They make a snowman and do snow angels and such, and he even manages to get her home in time for Christmas Eve festivities. They part a bit awkwardly, not quite acknowledging an attraction, and he heads home to Mom. But he never returns to school in January. Flash forward ten years: Maggie is a reporter in Harrison and one day in December she flips on the radio and hears the new morning DJ, none other than Mitch. She runs into him at a coffee shop and discovers that he's become a Christmas Grinch, but she doesn't know why. To cheer him up, she starts sending him a homemade gift a day, each one reminiscent of something they did in the past, and signs them from "Your Secret Santa." Mitch is irritated by the gifts but his boss decides they'd make a great publicity gimmick and contacts the local paper. Guess who's assigned to write a series of human interest stories about Mitch and his Secret Santa? Maggie, of course, who can't turn the assignment down because her paper is about to be bought by a big syndicate, and she needs to prove her worth to keep her job. Slowly Mitch's cold-heartedness starts to melt, but when he finds out her secret, he thinks she's done it solely to get a story and that puts an end to their budding relationship and to Mitch's newly-kindled feelings for Christmas—or does it?
This Hallmark Christmas movie doesn't quite have all the Hallmark genre criteria of the big city holiday movie, but it's got its own conventions that you can tick off: romance between clean-cut, nice looking leads—but not distractingly beautiful or sexy; a small town location; jazzy covers of secular Christmas songs used in the background; snow; disrupted plans—sometimes due to the snow; a last-minute bump in the road to happiness; a happy ending. The writing is a little sloppy in terms of plot and character development. For example, Mitch can't figure out who is sending the gifts even though the only person he knows in town is Maggie—plotwise, this is probably to allow a rival for Mitch's affections (a publicity-hungry yoga instructor) to stake a claim, but it's still handled awkwardly. And how does it take the entire length of the movie for Maggie to figure out what made Mitch a Grinch? I figured it out (and you will too) about ten seconds after he makes his first anti-Christmas remarks on the radio. I was only rooting for the two to get together because the genre demands it—their relationship is never presented in a realistic or compelling fashion. Nevin and Dunne are adequate leads, though the supporting cast virtually disappears into the background except for Geri Hall as Mitch's manager who deserved a bigger role. Still, I can’t bring myself to say that I disliked this movie; how can you dislike a cute puppy because it's not playful enough? It’s still a cute puppy. [Hallmark]
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