The Moments of Hope December 2024

Stories of Hope Inspired by Hallmark’s Miracles of Christmas

During the month of December I will highlight some of my favorite Hallmark Christmas movies.

These are movies that comforted me at different seasons of my life.

I found my way into the Hallmark Christmas Movie fandom in 2017, while facing my first Christmas as a widow. Since then, these movies have been a source of joy, inspiration, and hope.

Introducing my first pick of the holiday season: The Christmas Secret.

This 2014 movie is about Christine Eisley (Bethany Joy Lenz), a down-on-her-luck single mother of two. After being abandoned by her husband, the story opens as she and her children, Zach (William Ainscough) and Hailey (Jaeda Lily Miller), move and begin a new life in the town that her late father grew up in.

Struggling to make ends meet, Christine’s situation goes from bad to worse within minutes.

On her way to work, she stops and helps a woman who just crashed her car due to a medical emergency. 

While performing CPR, she loses a family heirloom—the only keepsake she has to remember her deceased parents. 

The act, while heroic, causes her to be late for work, and Christine’s Ebeneezer-Scrooge-of-a-boss actually fires her, unmoved by her fervent attempts to explain the circumstances.

Whoever came up with the phrase “when it rains, it pours” was obviously talking about this character, because (as if being without a job at Christmas and coming to the realization that her cherished family memento is lost forever wasn’t bad enough) Chrisine’s morning ends with her being served notice of a court appearance…courtesy of her estranged husband. The icing on the cake? The caseworker presenting the papers approaches her directly outside the place where she was just terminated. 

Things fall apart quickly, but, miracle of miracles, they come back together just as quickly. As she processes her shock, Christine stops in a bakery where she strikes up a conversation with the owner.  After explaining why she was wearing a uniform of the competitor’s establishment, was offered a job at the bakery.

What follows next is a friendship that, because this is a Hallmark movie, of course, turns into a Christmas miracle.

What was initially thought of as set backs was hope in disguise.

And where there’s hope there’s a way…