Holiday Movie Advent Calendar Day 14: Santa's Boots

In the spirit of the holiday season, Pittsburgh City Paper presents a holiday movie advent calendar. One holiday movie review, every day 'til Christmas (probably).

Surprise! It’s another Lifetime movie where a big city girl comes home for the holidays. In Santa's Boots, the city slicker is predictably-named Holly (Megan Hilty) whose dad owns the local department store, which has seen better days. (If only he had a daughter who could come back to town and try to save the store!)

On the other side of town, we meet predictably-named Nick (Noah Mills) whose dad owns the local Christmas tree farm. Nick’s dad is pushing him to take over the family business, but he has bigger dreams: becoming a department store Santa. Good thing his BFF Rob (Matt Hamilton) owns a Santa rental business.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ve made it thus far, you’ve just witnessed the birth of Hot Santa.

Speaking of BFFs, Holly’s best friend Elle (Patricia Isaac, who won’t stop singing for some godawful reason) works at Holly's dad’s store and convinces her to work as Santa’s helper after the store elf falls ill. Hence the birth of Holly the Elf, Hot Santa’s helper.

It’s at this moment that I interrupt this review to reveal that Holly reminds me of a friend of mine from elementary school who ditched me when she lost weight and became a cheerleader and joined the popular crowd and left me in her dust. So I pretty much spent the rest of this movie in misery, bitching out the main character for being successful and spending so much time with Hot Santa because who knows how many people she stepped on to make it this far in life, amiright?

I digress. Hot Santa is an immediate hit with the kids, even though none of them sits on his lap. He doesn’t even have a bench. There’s a second chair beside him for the kids to sit on, and they awkwardly lean over and whisper what they want into his ear. (Is this common these days?) Hot Santa also takes a lot of breaks where he takes off his coat and walks around in a tight T-shirt and suspenders.

Also, there’s a small part of the plot that tries desperately to reinvent itself as the modern day Cinderella. After Hot Santa leaves for an emergency and disappears for a few days, he leaves behind his boots but no contact number. Holly decides to try to find him by having random men in the mall try them on to see if they fit.

Only, she already knows what he looks like. She knows his name. She already spent the first half of the movie talking nonstop to him. She also has the phone number of the place that sent him. On top of all that, his feet look pretty average-sized so there’s no way there isn’t some random man in the mall who would be able to fit into his boots.

I’m guessing this small plot point was added because Lifetime needed a title for the movie and “Hot Christmas Tree Salesman Who Ends Up With Woman Who Probably Lost Weight and Ditched Her Old Friends” was too long.

Santa's Boots is available on Lifetime.