It’s time for one of those films about house swapping and I’ve never been crazy about the idea. I just don’t trust people at all so I feel like the instant I do one of these, I would lose some things. Things would mysteriously disappear and I would never see them again. That’s a really scary prospect so I would just be too emotional to go along with it. For the people who Air B&B they’re probably thinking I’m crazy though. It is what it is.

The dual main characters are Emily and Charles here. For Emily, she was looking forward to spending Christmas with Heather but her ungrateful daughter has decided to go on a date with Jason instead and will be spending the holidays with him. Emily figures that she can fly over to surprise Heather and dashes over only to find out that Heather snuck away to another state without telling her. Not a very nice thing to do here and now what is Emily supposed to do with herself. She’s alone at Christmas?? The horror of it all. That’s when she bumps into Ray, a good friend of the guy she is borrowing the apartment from and a fast romance starts.

From the 3 plots this is probably the one where you are the most sympathetic to the lead. Emily is just trying to spend quality time with her daughter and the whole surprise visit seems like a fun idea. What are the odds Heather would just switch states right? It’s also rough to lose traditions so suddenly and without warning like this. It’s just tough and that’s why you can’t really buy into the romance here because it seems like Ray caught her at a very vulnerable time. Additionally the 180 to Emily suddenly not being interested in traditions and such was pretty rough. It was all so sudden and I guess in the end it’s like nobody wins.

Ray is nice enough but again the romance is all just so fast and contrived. He should have stayed in his lane and not made a pass at someone who is just renting the apartment for a few days. In theory once she left he would never see her again unless they got really serious about each other really quickly which doesn’t seem like such a good idea. You don’t really know the other person at that point.

Then we have the plot with Heather and Jason which is the weakest one. The whole time it seemed to be building up to a choice of regret where Jason just wasn’t a great guy and they were going to break up as she realized that traditions are good. He lets his friends crash in on their date and kept making the worst decisions possible. He wasn’t even interested in watching her old wonderful place movie. Well eventually they head back and it turns out that he’s a decent dude but the whole plot felt like a bit of a wash. It just didn’t have much of a purpose here. I’d say Heather had a purpose, but not so much Jason except to be a red herring here.

Finally we have the plot with Charles and Faith which was easily the most entertaining. So Charles is an author who writes a ton of books and he is trying to have a quiet place to focus. So that kind of works and he has a spot now except that Faith shows up because she was actually trying to surprise Emily which didn’t work out. The problem is that she terrifies Charles so he runs around crying the whole time about how she is distracting him and being a big baby about the whole thing.

There’s a lot of banter here throughout as a result and Faith really does good on her end like with keeping the neighbors out and even making food. I was on her side the whole time because Charles was often panicking about nothing and was also way too defensive about his books. The guy could stand to learn how to accept some constructive criticism. He eventually does but the plot takes a bit longer than it should have. Once again you have a hard time seeing just why the romance would start here. Maybe if Charles had been a bit nicer from the start there could have been a chance.

Of course then there would be less witty banter so I suppose I would miss that part. Charles just thinks too highly of himself and generalizes everyone which Faith calls him out on. At least now his next books will end up being better. The movie did a good job of balancing these 3 films the whole time. It felt like there was way more of a story here than I would have expected otherwise. The movie isn’t even that long and yet it paces everything well so it gets full kudos for that. You don’t feel like any plot got the short end of the stick.

Heather’s certainly has the least amount of screentime but that makes sense because it’s not like her house was one of the ones that was swapped. At most you could say that with more screentime they could have set things up a bit better to establish that she was trying to have it both ways a bit too much with ditching traditions while still following others and that would help her realize that she really wasn’t nice to her mother at all. A good redemption arc would be nice since she was so petty the whole time.

Overall, Trading Christmas definitely doesn’t change my mind on why I wouldn’t want to ever trade houses/apartments even just for a week or so. I would have real security issues but naturally it does make for a very good movie plot. This movie is charming and fun throughout the whole adventure with good writing and pacing the whole time. Often times you can expect maybe 2 main plots at most but 3 in this Christmas adventure was really taking things to the next level and I was really impressed to see it. The bar was set high here without a doubt. If you’re up for a fun Christmas title then you definitely won’t want to miss out on this.

Overall 7/10