The Christmas Shoes Sequel The Christmas Blessing is Irresistibly Maudlin in that Deeply Imitable Christmas Movie Kind of Way — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

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The Christmas Blessing is a sequel to the 2002 Yuletide tear-jerker The Christmas Shoes, which was based on a 2000 song from Christian country pop schlockmeisters NewSong about a sad little boy on Christmas Eve who wants to buy a pair of red dancing shoes for his dying mother so he tells a cold-hearted store clerk, “Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my mama, please/It’s Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size/Could you hurry, sir, daddy says there's not much time/You see she's been sick for quite a while/And I know these shoes would make her smile/And I want her to look beautiful if mama meets Jesus tonight.”

The clerk tells him he doesn’t have enough money, so he AND his terminally ill mother can go fuck themselves with their broke, dying asses but the man behind him, who is also the narrator of the song, pays for the shoes and learns the true meaning of Christmas in the process.

It is, as you might imagine, maudlin to a vomit-inducing degree, a sugary glob of Yuletide melodrama so overwrought and ridiculous that it’s seemingly beyond parody. In The Christmas Shoes, Rob Lowe plays the kindly benefactor who gets a quick, profound lesson in what’s truly important from a chance encounter with a big-eyed moppet who grows up to be hotshot surgeon Nathan Andrews (Neil Patrick Harris).

The Christmas Blessing takes place nearly two decades after the events of the first film yet was puzzlingly only released three years later. That means that Canadian character actor Hugh Thompson played the role of Nathan’s emotionally closed off father Jack, the father of a ten year old in 2002, and just three years later had somehow graduated to playing the father of a doctor in his late twenties.

I’m sorry I can’t be more specific but there is a scene in The Christmas Blessing where Jack is asked how old his son is and he answers, “Late twenties.” Bear in mind, Nathan is living with him at this point, so it’s not like they have a distant relationship, yet when asked for his only son’s age the best he can do is ballpark it as being somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty.

The filmmakers put a little bit of gray in Hugh Thompson’s beard that does very little to hide the fact that he’s suddenly way too young for his role. Nathan and his distractingly young old man sometimes butt heads over Jack’s unwillingness to process the death of his beloved wife and Nathan’s eagerness to do nothing but process the death of his beloved mother but you’d think they’d get along better, since they appear to be roughly the same age.

The Christmas Blessing opens with Dr. Nathan Andrews in his element, assuring a patient that he’ll have him home in time for Christmas. When he fails to deliver on that promise and his patient dies, as patients sometimes do on the surgery table, the very good doctor is so discouraged that he gives up medicine for a simple life fixing cars alongside his dad and volunteering to coach kid’s basketball.

In Christmas movies, as well as Tyler Perry films, being rich and leading a glamorous, continental existence almost inevitably leaves you soul-sick and in desperate need of humility and life lessons but working with your hands and/or with children (preferably sick and poor children) makes you saintly, happy and wise.

Nathan is subsequently way happier fixing cars than human bodies. Then he meets cute with Meghan Sullivan (Rebecca Gayheart), an impossibly kind-hearted school teacher who wants to buy a house to facilitate free childcare and medical services for disadvantaged single mothers and their children.

Angus T. Jones of Two and a Half Men fame costars as Charlie Bennett, one of Meghan’s students and a member of the team Nathan coaches. We learn from a newspaper clipping that Charlie’s rough-hewn dad Tucker carries with him everywhere that his wife died in a car accident after abandoning her family.

Tucker can’t bear to tell his son the truth, about either his mother abandoning them or her subsequent death so he tells her an endless series of colorful, flattering stories that contradict each other about the glamorous life she now leads.

Sad little Charlie becomes the owner of the Christmas shoes before coming down with a terrible case of Christmas Dying Disease, an affliction that causes characters to perish on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day in a manner designed to fill the living with a renewed appreciation for the gift of life and Texas-sized doses of the Christmas spirit.

For a while it looks like Meghan might also come down with a narratively convenient case of Christmas Dying Disease, since it turns out that she’s also terribly ill but she makes a remarkable comeback in time for a film-ending Christmas concert featuring NewSong, the group that gave the world “The Christmas Shoes” AND special guest star Blake Shelton.

If Meghan hadn’t made it they would have had to rename this Everyone Dies on Christmas, which is, honestly, a real bummer of a title.

The world did not need the song “The Christmas Shoes.” Even by Christmas song standards it’s almost inconceivably, unbearably maudlin. It sure as shit did not need a movie based on it. And it sure did not need for that movie to become a trilogy. That’s right, The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing were followed in 2009 by The Christmas Hope.

The Christmas Blessing is ridiculous and shameless yet far more affecting than it really has any right to be. Harris is way too good for this kind of dodgy material but he elevates The Christmas Blessing with a performance so grounded that it single-handedly keeps the movie from devolving into pure kitsch.

I’m not sure that is an entirely positive development. If given a choice, I generally prefer the hilariously inept to the unexpectedly competent but The Christmas Blessing did give me plenty to chortle over, mostly involving the preposterously overwrought death of a small child.

And if that isn’t the true meaning of Christmas I don’t know what is!

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