One of my all time favorites.

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely the worst movie.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Brooke Nevin & Robin Dunne star as Maggie and Mitch, who once upon a time were in college together and find themselves back in their hometown and begin to reacquaint their friendship. Maggie has only fond memories of Mitch, who helped her get home for Christmas when she was a freshman. Maggie always wondered what happened and why Mitch never came back to college... He also has no Christmas spirit whatsoever, so Maggie sets out to rekindle his spirit and hopefully some romance as well. She begins sending him anonymous packages full of Christmas cheer. To complicate matters the packages become a media frenzy and she is assigned to write a story on them for the local paper. Will Maggie tell Mitch before someone else takes credit for the cheer? Cute romantic Christmas flick.

So predictable, yet so good. This is a creative twist to the twelve days of Christmas theme.Brooke Nevin and Robin Dunne are great on screen together. You can see the chemistry all the way back in the college scenes, and it never lessens. And this movie puts them together a lot. So many other movies have the future lovers together for such small parts of the movie, but in this movie their relationship is almost always on screen, even if one of them is momentarily off the screen. This factor is a major part of my enjoyment of the movie.And the story is so heartwarming and good. True it is corny. True, Mitch should have figured it out early in the game, probably after Briana confessed it wasn't her. And Mitch should have jumped on the relationship long before the secret was out. They were clearly already in love. Also Mitch and Rita's outrage are totally hypocritical, thus making their outrage a little unbelievable.In a day where journalism has sunk to new lows and no longer presents honest or unbiased news, Maggie's crimes against journalistic integrity are so forgivable. Still her confessions on the front page are yet another sparkling ornament to the story, like the angel on top of the tree.The Twelve Gifts not only helped Mitch to renew his love for Christmas, but bolstered mine as well.

Of all the general plots of the Hallmark movies, Christmas and otherwise, my favorite is the quiet, reserved, crushing female lead doing battle with the aggressive, flashy, or sometimes even a little bit evil, hussy for the heart of a tenderhearted prince. This movie has that plot and a Christmas theme as well.The three key factors that make a movie like this one are, is there a real romantic story, are the supporting characters or story lines funny and/or interesting, and is the plot relatively believable and the Christmas theme well done.This movie has all three. While not laugh out loud funny the supporting characters do provide laughs and a base for the movie. The story is told in a subtle way allowing the characters to have a little dimension. It has a nice believable backstory that adds to its charm. It ties Christmas into its plot very well.Needless to say the result is predictable but if you were looking for suspense you will not be watching the last ten minutes of this kind of movie. However, for a nice two hours of Christmas diversion while you are wrapping some presents, this will work.

At the beginning of the commercial for this movie, which was featured on the Hallmark Channel, my wife and I thought that the lead was being played by James Van Der Beek, who had previously been in the movie "Varsity Blues". But when we actually paid attention to the commercial, we realized that it was just some guy. After watching that commercial, we referred to the that guy as a "poor man's James Van Der Beek". And whenever that commercial came on again, we would always say, "Hey, there's poor man's James Van Der Beek". In reading this IMDb page, I found out that poor man's James Van Der Beek is really named Robin Dunne. I'm not really trying to be insulting to Robin Dunne, or even to James Van Der Beek. It's just that Robin Dunne kind of looks James Van Der Beek when watching him on TV out of the corner of your eye.I did watch a bit of this movie last night. It seemed that some woman was throwing herself at poor man's James Van Der Beek and he was just kind of shrugging his shoulders. She was also his Secret Santa even though he didn't consent to be in a Secret Santa exchange. Apparently he lost the Christmas spirit some time ago due to his parents joining some Satanic cult on Christmas day when he was younger or something like that. I didn't really pay attention, and my wife was asleep on the couch during the movie as well. We turned it off halfway through.Personally, I think it would be great to have James Van Der Beek and Robin Dunne, the poor man's James Van Der Beek, over to dinner so that we could talk about how they look somewhat alike. They would probably get annoyed because that is all I would want to talk about at dinner, but whatever - I am feeding them, so they should be open to talking about what I'm interested in. Besides, I make a mean pot roast, so that would be worth sitting around for three hours and talking about how they have some similar features.