Magical Santas, meet-cutes and duelling Donna Kelce roles

A revolution is happening in the Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas universe. Yes, there are still plenty of magical Santa Claus sightings and people with perfect hair despite wearing winter hats in the snow (if they’re wearing hats at all), but things are changing.

Lead actors mingle before the final five minutes of the movie! Scripts wink at the ridiculous plots that have become cliche! Longtime Hallmark Christmas movie actors make cameos in other films! The NFL has partnered with the network (OK, we can attribute that to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance)! Not every song is a rendition of “Jingle Bells”! There is more than one Hanukkah-themed movie!

With the Christmas holidays, we watched dozens of hours of Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas slate to pick the most notable releases this season. Which Donna Kelce cameo reigns supreme and which movies are worth watching while lounging in your favorite holiday PJs? We have answers. (Though I’ll save my conspiracy theory about the connection between Hallmark Channel’s rise in popularity and matching family jammies until next year).

Spoiler alert: Each movie has a happy ending and everyone’s in love — but you probably already knew that.

“Santa Tell Me” might be the quintessential movie of this year’s crop. It has holiday magic, multiple meet-cutes, an enemies-to-lovers relationship, an ambitious main character making a name for herself returning to her roots. And there’s a sad backstory about her parents. Could it be any more fitting for Countdown to Christmas?

Olivia (Erin Krakow) has a chance to have her own interior design show, but her new producer, the bossy Chris (Daniel Lissing), who is in charge of a “Love Island”-esque show called “Model Home,” changes plans and has Olivia restore her childhood home on a tight budget instead. Once she’s there, she finds a magic letter from Santa. It answers a query from long ago, when as a precocious child — one who presumably watched too many holiday romance movies — she asked the name of her true love, which the magic letter reveals to be Nick.

And just like that, she meets three different guys named Nick and she has to pick the right one by Christmas or lose her true love forever. Donna Kelce’s sons, Travis (of Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs fame) and Jason (a retired Philadelphia Eagle), have starred in dozens of commercials, but Mama Kelce gets more lines in two Hallmark films.

Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story” is the superior watch. It stars Hunter King as a woman in a family of die-hard Chiefs fans whose magic hat is responsible for multiple Super Bowl wins (take that, Patrick Mahomes). Tyler Hynes co-stars as a team marketing exec. Kelce works at the barbecue joint owned by the heroine’s grandparents. Though I’m a Ravens fan whose championship dreams were crushed by the Chiefs last year, this was a fun watch with lots of NFL cameos, but it will trigger Raiders and Broncos fans.

The Philly-centric “Christmas on Call” follows a doctor (Sara Canning) who’s new in town and falls in love with an Eagles-loving EMT (Ser’Darius Blain), but even the cheesesteaks “whiz wit” that Kelce slings in the movie can’t spice up this offering. When the plots of Hallmark Christmas movies have become so ubiquitous that they’re punchlines and there’s a plot generator, it’s nice to see the channel play along, as it does in “Sugarplummed.”

When overworked lawyer and mom Emily (Maggie Lawson) wishes for a perfect Christmas, Sugarplum (Janel Parrish), the beloved “Harmony Home Network” holiday movie character, comes to her aid. Sugarplum even tries to have the rules from her town of Perfection apply to the real world. For example, rule No. 47 says, “When a big city girl meets a small town bachelor over the holidays, they’re guaranteed to fall in love and get married.”

Another nod goes to “The Santa Class,” which features Hallmark regular Paul Campbell as a minor character playing a fictional version of himself to hilarious results. He enrolls in classes at a struggling Santa school (the movie’s main plot) as he considers taking the role of Santa in an upcoming Hallmark Christmas movie.

Tribune News Service