Christmas Together With You debuted Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, on the Hallmark Channel as part of its Countdown to Christmas series.

Megan is an unlucky-at-love coffee shop owner who is best friends with Frank, a 70-ish widower who carries around a photograph of Claire, his first girlfriend from 50 years ago, and not his wife of thirty-plus years who recently died.

With her own love life in tatters, Megan urges Frank to look up his old flame. Odds are Claire’s either buried or married, and he wants to leave the past in the past. She ignores his wishes and stalks her on the Internet.

Turns out Claire is alive and kicking in a town a few hundred miles away, and Megan suggests a road trip. Once again Frank says he’s not interested in reliving the past, but after realizing how much effort Megan put in to finding her (thirty minutes of Googling and a short email to a stranger), he decides to go along on the off chance Claire still carries a torch for a guy she hasn’t seen in fifty years.

Megan stops to buy Frank a coffee. A rude lout on a cell phone lets his mangy mongrel of a mutt run amok and smash into Megan. She spills coffee all over her jacket. The boorish man shoves a wad of cash at her and mumbles an apology, all the while managing to keep his cell phone glued to his ear.

When Frank and Megan reach their destination, they check into the only inn in town. Lo and behold, the buffoon with the unruly pooch runs the lodge. Steve, a hotel hotshot who lives on the other side of the country, bought the place a year ago as an investment. He forced his parents to ditch their retirement plans and run it, but their indifference and incompetence has let the inn fall into a dangerous state of disrepair. Despite a list of one-star reviews longer than Courtney Love’s rap sheet, the inn continues to pull in paying customers and is somehow booked for the weekend.

Before Steve gives Megan and Frank the Joseph and Mary treatment and tells them the inn is full, an unhappy guest demands to be freed from this hellhole because the heat in her room isn’t working and she’s worried about catching fleas from that mangy mongrel Max, who lounges around the lobby licking his balls all day long. You’re in luck, Steve tells Megan and Frank, and happily boots out the old coot to give them a room that doesn’t even meet the standards for POWs set by the Geneva Convention.

Frank’s reunion with Claire gets off to a rocky start. She turns him down when he asks for a date and then blows him off when he shows up with a group of Christmas carolers and starts singing their song. Turned off by his tone-deaf caterwauling, she tells him she doesn’t want to set herself up for more heartbreak and stomps away.

Megan convinces Claire to give him another chance, and they enjoy a romantic dinner at a nice restaurant followed by a moonlit stroll. Their love seems to be rekindling, but Claire admits she can’t let go of the heartache and splits again, leaving Frank stammering more apologies.

Before leaving town, Frank writes a note to Claire explaining that he ditched her half a century earlier because her old man believed his daughter could do better (why Frank couldn’t have told her this face-to-face the first, second or third time she brought up how heartbroken she was beggars belief).

Unbeknownst to Megan, Steve’s mangy mutt Max somehow climbed into the back of her car undetected and pops up when they’re about halfway home. Given no choice, she returns to the Inn and drops off the stowaway. Steve, a heartless monster who didn’t realize his dog was missing for half a day, asks Megan to stay. Despite having spent little time alone together, she agrees.

Relationship update: Steve gets sued for all he’s worth when an octogenarian guest tumbles down the rickety steps his parents neglected to repair. Realizing Steve’s about to lose everything, Megan hightails it back to the city and her beloved coffee shop.

Real review: This movie was hard to watch. Niall’s character was unlikeable for so many reasons. The plot, what little there was of it, moved along at a glacier pace. There was zero chemistry between the two love interests, mainly because they hardly spent any time alone together. The attempts at comedy fell flat. Just a huge swing and miss by Hallmark. Won’t be watched again.

My IMDb rating: 4 stars out of 10.

Check out these other reviews

• Christmas Together with You (2021)
• Coyote Creek Christmas (2021)
• You, Me and the Christmas Trees (2021)
• Christmas by Starlight (2020)
• The Angel Tree (2020)
• Jingle Bell Bride (2020)
• If I Only Had Christmas (2020)
• A Glenbrooke Christmas (2020)
• Christmas Wishes and Mistletoe Kisses (2019)
• Dashing through the Snow (2015)
• Christmas Land (2015)

Olivia is a dedicated arborist for the University of Connecticut who is known as the tree whisperer. She’s also a major disappointment to her parents, who despite her shortcomings invite her to come home for Christmas anyway.

Olivia was supposed to get married over Christmas, but she called it off six months earlier. Not wanting to get grilled yet again by her taciturn parents, she searches for any excuse to avoid going home. When a hapless tree farmer calls her three weeks before Christmas to see if she can help figure out why all his trees turn brown a few days after being cut, she leaps at the chance to spend the holidays traipsing around the frigid woods of his farm instead of going home to her parents, who exude even less warmth than she’ll find in that frozen tundra.

Olivia’s GPS navigation system short circuits. She stops in the middle of a roundabout while she tries to figure out where she is and is promptly rear-ended by Jack, the aforementioned hapless tree farmer. He had spilled his coffee in his lap and wasn’t paying attention when the accident occurred, yet somehow blames it on Olivia.

Jack and Olivia overcome a start that is rockier than his farmland and get to work figuring out what is going on with his trees. Well, sort of. She spends most of her time taking in all the small-town charms of Avon, winning the design-your-own cider contest and charming all the townsfolk. While investigating his problem, she encourages Jack to diversify his crops, but he is hellbent on growing only trees and resents her meddling.

She figures out they are suffering from indigestion and concocts some colorful Alka Seltzer pills in her fancy lab at the university (now we know why tuition costs are sky-high). Her potion keeps the trees green a few days longer, meaning the town won’t become a living fire hazard until after Christmas.

A few plops and fizzes later, Jack’s trees are once again selling like hot cakes. Her work means the town will buy the official Christmas tree from his farm yet again, foiling the efforts of rival tree grower Duane, who somehow has a tree farm even though everyone in town hates him. Those people refused to buy trees from him even after Jack’s crop proved worthless.

Fueled by a jealous rage, Duane pays a couple of local ne’er-do-wells to poison Jack’s tree, but Olivia discovers their plan and saves the day with more of her magic potion.

Relationship update: Olivia cements her reputation as the tree whisperer, but when Jack follows her advice and plants a crop of tomatoes that wither on the vine the next summer, he dumps her.