The Christmas Secret

Christine Eisley is a single mother in a small Vermont town whose life is coming apart just before Christmas. She loses her job as a waitress, faces eviction, and her ex-husband is seeking custody of their children, Zach and Kelly. In the middle of these troubles she rescues an older woman who has suffered a heart attack, and during the rescue she loses a compass medallion that belonged to the father she never knew.

The woman she helped, Judy Wilson, asks her grandson Jason to track Christine down so she can be thanked, and he and Christine keep crossing paths. Meanwhile, a new job at a local bakery and an old family secret begin to change her circumstances. The film is a Hallmark television movie directed by Norma Bailey, made in Canada and the United States, and based on a novel by Donna VanLiere. Bethany Joy Lenz plays Christine, with John Reardon as Jason and supporting turns from Jaeda Lily Miller, William Ainscough and Nicola Cavendish among a cast of twenty-one.

It sits between Bailey's Stolen Miracle and later films such as Love on the Danube: Royal Getaway and The Way to You. Audience response has been warm: on IMDb it holds 7.4 from around 4,500 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.8 from 121 votes, a higher and more widely supported score on the larger sample.