Christmas. …Again?! Is Disney Channel’s latest original movie and it’s their Christmas present to the world this year.
When change rears it’s unfamiliar head and a wish is granted, 12 year Rowena—played by Scarlett Estevez—finds herself stuck in Disney’s version of the time loop where she gets to revisit some of her favorite holiday memories but it’s also an opportunity to fix what now feels fractured—her family.
We’re supposed to believe that her now blended family is a problem but they seem pretty ok. The separated mom and dad get along, her sister is lightheartedly annoying, the stepmom and her son are pretty nice, her abuelo and abuela are wholesome old folks and her uncles are funny. Plus they’re all together for Christmas! Doesn’t seem so bad to us.
Of course it’s easy for a young kid to have a different perspective on things when this isn’t how it always used to be. Holiday traditions can be integral for a kid, it creates this sense of familiar comfort so change can come as quite a shock for a kid around this age. It’s often the time in a kid’s life when Santa becomes full fiction and the idea of Christmas evolves.
But Rowena is able to have some holiday time looping fun, reliving her best memories until she realizes her isolation in them prompting some tough reality checks that maybe things aren’t so bad after all. So she’s able to learn a thing or two and comes to accept her blended family as they are now and essentially discovers the true meaning of Christmas. It’s one special time of the year where you have the chance to be with friends and/or family with the opportunity to make new memories. You can embrace traditions while also creating new ones.
The movie actually does a good job with its diverse representation of race and sexual orientation. It’s one of the few Disney channel movies to consist of an African American Santa, an LGBTQ+ couple and be led by a Hispanic lead.
I gave it a watch because it was a new Holiday movie this year and I tend to give most notable ones a chance. Yet sadly this one will still probably end up as some forgettable TV movie and I’d hate for it to quickly fade from my memory without reading up on the man behind the camera, Andy Fickman.
His directing work consists of some raunchy early 2000s comedies before going back and forth between Kevin James projects and Disney titles. The strangest bit of Fickman trivia though is that he got his start in the industry as an associate Producer on 1997s Anaconda.
Anyways, Christmas …Again?! is available on Disney Plus
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