Great American Family
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄🎄
Description: Based on Karen Kingsbury’s 2025 book by the same name, in The Christmas Ring, military widow Vanessa Mayfield (Kramer) has spent years searching for her family’s treasured Christmas ring, a gold-and-ruby heirloom discovered by her great-grandfather in Normandy on D-Day and passed down through generations before Vanessa lost it. Her search leads her to Ben Miller (Hollingsworth), a widowed antiques dealer who understands her loss, and a friendship between them gradually becomes an unexpected second chance at love. As Christmas approaches, Vanessa prepares for her annual military Christmas dance and the return of her college-age daughter, Sadie (Ashley Brown) who doesn’t yet know about Ben. Meanwhile, Ben’s father and business partner, Howard Miller (Grammer), unknowingly acquires Vanessa’s missing ring in a box of antiques and, unaware of its history, plans to sell the valuable find. When Ben realizes the ring his father is about to sell is the heirloom Vanessa has searched for all these years, he races to save it – setting in motion a Christmas reunion with a treasured piece of Vanessa’s past and the possibility of a new future neither Vanessa nor Ben thought they would find again.
Overall Review: Well, Great American, look at you.
The Christmas Ring is one of the best movies I’ve seen from Great American Family, and I’m happy to report that the network got several things right that have needed improving since they started in this endeavor. I’m giving them a generous four trees, though really I think it’s more like three trees seen with an astigmatism.
Let’s start with the faith element, because this is where the movie actually impressed me. Great American has a tendency to incorporate Christianity into its movies with all the subtlety of someone grabbing a microphone in the middle of Christmas dinner and announcing that it’s time for an altar call. I appreciate the desire to include faith in these stories, but sometimes the execution feels forced, awkward, or like the writers are checking it off a list.
Not here. In The Christmas Ring, faith felt like a natural part of the characters’ lives. It wasn’t obnoxious and it wasn’t shoehorned into conversations It didn’t feel like the story was periodically stopping to make sure we’d received the message. It was simply woven into who these people were and how they lived. That’s exactly how faith can work in a Christmas movie. It adds depth to the characters without making the audience feel like they’ve accidentally wandered into a Sunday school lesson.
Someone at Great American has also discovered that Christmas movies are supposed to look like Christmas. The decorations were noticeably better than the network’s usual offerings, and the overall atmosphere felt much more polished. It was a welcome improvement. Unfortunately, there was one area where the movie didn’t quite deliver: the romance.
Hollingsworth and Kramer were both perfectly fine in their roles, but the chemistry between them just wasn’t quite there. I wanted to believe in the relationship more than I actually did. The story gave me all the right reasons to root for them, but their interactions never quite generated that extra spark that makes a Christmas movie romance particularly memorable. If anything keeps this movie from being an enthusiastic four-tree recommendation, it’s that missing romantic chemistry. But I’m not going to let one weakness overshadow everything the movie accomplished.
This is one of Great American’s strongest efforts. Now, if they can just figure out how to make their romantic leads look like they’re actually falling in love, we might really be onto something.
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