A Pickleball Christmas: just one of the dozens of made-for-tv movies in the crop for this Christmas. I was dumbfounded when an ad for it came up repeatedly on the Lifetime network. What next?, I wondered, will there be A Grand Theft Auto Christmas, with prostitutes in place of Christmas elves? A Lego Christmas? A Stud Poker Christmas? A Stud Hustler Christmas? (gay porn flicks exist with this theme, but not, I think, with this title). Great filmic visas open up.
So: some details on A Pickleball Christmas. And then a few more notable titles from this years crop. And some reflections on Christmas movies
Christmas pickleballs. The movie:
Lafferty and Allen on the courtOfficial description: Fresh off the biggest win of his career, tennis star Luke Hollis (James Lafferty) heads home to Florida for Christmas, only to discover his family’s racquet club is on the verge of being sold. Teaming up with Caroline (Zibby Allen), the club’s pickleball coach, Luke reluctantly agrees to compete in a high-stakes holiday tournament that could save the club. As sparks fly both on and off the court, Luke realizes the greatest victory might just be love, family, and a new chapter at home.
Love, family, and a new life. Durable themes.
This year’s Christmas movies. On the TV Guide site, “The new Christmas movies in 2025”:
All I want for Christmas is a holiday film about a woman who uses prosthetics to pretend she’s a man in order to play Santa Claus at a ski resort so she can get a discount on snowboarding lessons for her daughter … and my Christmas wish has been granted! My Secret Santa is just one of many new holiday movies coming down Christmas Lane this year.
And though there may be fewer movies this holiday season than last year … you can expect the same amount of magic that culminates in a tender kiss beneath the mistletoe between two people who until just moments earlier were total strangers or ex-lovers or enemies for about 90 minutes plus commercials.
Here are the new holiday movies coming this winter to Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, and more. And because certain networks go all out for Christmas, we have individual calendars for Hallmark, Lifetime, and Great American Family
A sampling from this list, to illustrate something of the range of the new offerings:
A Merry Little Ex-Mas (ex-es behaving foolishly)
A Very Jonas Christmas (3 of the 4 Jonas Brothers)
Jingle Bell Heist (“underpaid singles who decide to become small-time thieves targeting a London department store”
Merchants of Joy (a documentary about “five families who dominate Christmas tree sales in New York City”)
Goodbye June (Helen Mirren as a mother dying at Christmastime; family love conquers all)
Some of these I would consider seeing (the Jonas Brothers are something of a guilty pleasure for me, and I’d watch Helen Mirren in almost anything, though I’m mightily wary of both of these movies), but the full list was, well, dispiriting to me, at least at first. They all turn out to be formulaic in plot (but quite varied in setting), resolving to a happy couple and/or the joy of familial love. In a moment, I will reconsider my easy dismissal of these movies as formulaic.
There are an enormous number of them, enough that they can be considered a significant source of employment for competent B- and C-list actors — along with daytime soap operas, all those incarnations of Law & Order, and the like.
By now, I thought, with dozens coming out every year, there must be a bank of many hundreds of them. Why make new ones? At least part of the answer is that almost all of each year’s movies are set in the moment, with all the details — the material circumstances of our lives (cars, phones, household furnishings, the whole thing), the fashions in clothes, haircuts, accessories, and the like, the music, the slang we use, the topics of our small talk, innumerable details that the makers of the films don’t have to research and recreate and that the viewers can take to be about them, so that they can fully identify with the characters.
But even if this weren’t so, there would still be a market for more fresh movies telling formulaic stories, because the stories are soothing, holding out the hope that we will all find our true loves and our warm embracing families, whatever tribulations we might suffer. And showing that this hope is fulfilled through all sorts of variations in the details of the situation. The stories are useful; they have a purpose; they are a type of utilitarian art, comparable to dance music, political cartooning, hymns, advertising copy, national anthems, and, yes, porn in a variety of media. All of these can be created with a high degree of craft or skill — so, artfully; and all can, on occasion, be worked into free-standing art forms, judged by aesthetic criteria rather than primarily by success in achieving their purpose. But serving their purpose well is of value in its own right.
Having said all that, it’s still true that the makers of Christmas movies seem willing to go to great lengths to put fresh spin on old formulas, which is what brings us pickleball, department store thieves, and further surprises.
Bonus note. On the Rotten Tomatoes site, “The 100 best Christmas movies of all time”, ranks the movies by their RT review scores. But it’s a mixture of movies for playing at Christmas (like The Wizard of Oz) and Christmas-themed movies.
#1 is the romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner (1940), with a 99% rating.The highest-ranked Christmas-themed movie is #5, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), with a 96% rating
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