A Christmas Tree Miracle (2013)

A Christmas Tree Miracle arrives with zero pretense. It is a low-budget, faith-leaning family film shot in Wheeling, West Virginia and on an eastern Ohio Christmas tree farm, starring Kevin Sizemore as a land developer who loses his job, his house, and eventually his family's capacity for ingratitude. The message is telegraphed in the title. The execution is rougher than a freshly cut Fraser fir. And yet the film lands its one punch cleanly.

What A Christmas Tree Miracle Is About

David George (Sizemore) has the full package: suburban house, corporate job, two teenagers obsessed with upgrading their possessions, and a six-year-old daughter named Nina who is the only member of the household still capable of wonder. When David loses his job right before the holidays, nobody treats it as serious. The family continues spending as if the paychecks are still arriving. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect.

Forced out of their home, the Georges are taken in by Henry, an eccentric Christmas tree farmer played by Terry Kiser. Henry is gruff, warm, and dispensing quiet wisdom at regular intervals. Life on the farm strips away the conveniences the family has been mistaking for necessities. The teenagers discover that physical labor exists. David discovers that his identity does not, in fact, depend on his job title. Lessons are learned.

It is not a complicated film. Writer Ty DeMartino and director J.W. Myers are not attempting complicated. They are attempting sincere, and they get there.

Terry Kiser Carrying More Than His Share

Terry Kiser is 73 years old in this film and delivers more than the script deserves. He is best known for playing the late Bernie Lomax in Weekend at Bernie's (1989) and its 1993 sequel, a role requiring him to be convincingly dead while two men drag him around a beach house. Henry the Christmas tree farmer is a different register entirely, and Kiser handles the transition with no apparent effort.

Kiser won an Obie Award in 1967 for his stage work, became a lifetime member of The Actors Studio, and spent decades on television from The Love Boat to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He brings that accumulated craft to a small Christian film in Ohio and uses it to make a thinly written mentor figure feel like an actual person. That is a professional doing professional work regardless of the budget.

Jill Whelan, who played Vicki Stubing on The Love Boat from 1978 to 1986, appears here as Cindy Cruthers. Her presence alongside Kiser gives the film a strange nostalgic texture, as if the production accidentally assembled a small Love Boat reunion without fully realizing it.

The Materialism Angle, Handled Honestly

Christian family films have a tendency to soften their financial reckoning. The family spends too much, learns a lesson, and then some third-act development restores their comfortable life so the moral doesn't actually cost them anything. A Christmas Tree Miracle holds the line a bit longer than that. The Georges spend genuine time without their phones, their routines, and their sense of entitlement before the film lets them back up.

Nina, the six-year-old played by Siomha Kenney, functions as the film's moral compass. She is not a precocious-child movie trope, exactly. She is simply a young child who has not yet learned to be bored by the things that genuinely matter. The contrast between her and her older siblings is the film's most effective dramatic tool, and it works because Kenney is a natural on screen.

Kevin Sizemore, a West Virginia native who has appeared in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Miracles from Heaven, was vocal about his connection to the material during the film's premiere at the restored Capital Music Hall in Wheeling on November 15, 2013. Shooting in his home state gave the production an authenticity that carries into his performance.

Where the Film Falls Short

The pacing drags in the second act. Several scenes that could make the same point in two minutes run four. The teenage characters are drawn almost entirely in broad strokes: they want things, they resist change, they come around. Barrett Carnahan and Emily Capehart do what they can with Nick and Natalie, but the script doesn't give them much to work with beyond a before-and-after arc.

The production value is what it is. Scenes shot in the family's original suburban home look fine. Scenes shot on the farm look like they were shot in November in Ohio on a limited schedule, because they were. Audiences who can't watch a Christmas movie without production polish from a major studio will not enjoy this film. That is a perfectly reasonable preference.

The film premiered in 2013, the same year that Saving Mr. Banks, American Hustle, and The Wolf of Wall Street were competing for awards attention. Comparing A Christmas Tree Miracle to those films is like comparing a handmade ornament to a Faberge egg. They are made for entirely different purposes and entirely different audiences.

Who This Film Is Actually For

The film has a 6.6 on IMDB, which is an accurate score for what it is attempting. It carries a Dove Foundation endorsement and is distributed in exactly the way faith-based family films get distributed: church networks, Christian broadcast television, home video, and now streaming. Its audience knows what it wants from a Christmas movie, and A Christmas Tree Miracle delivers it without irony or embarrassment.

If you are the kind of viewer who finds the anti-materialism Christmas movie genre tired and obvious, this film will confirm your priors. If you are looking for something to watch with children under 12 that has no violence, no cynicism, and a genuinely warm performance from a veteran actor playing a Christmas tree farmer in Ohio, this is 103 minutes that will not annoy you.

The film was partly shot at Barkcamp State Park in Ohio. Henry's farm looks real because much of it was real. That matters more than you'd think.