The Christmas List (1997)
Perfume saleslady Melody Parris feels like her life is in neutral. Her stick-in-the mud boyfriend won't commit and she gets passed over for a promotion at the store where she works. She decides to make a Christmas list. After it's deposited in Santa's mailbox at the store, she starts getting everything she wanted, but it doesn't always turn out as she expected.
rating 6/10 User rating 19 votes 62% ❄ Christmas Connection
A perfume counter clerk writes a Christmas wish list and drops it in the department store Santa's mailbox, setting off a season of wishes granted with unexpected consequences. Christmas isn't just the backdrop here; it's the entire engine of the plot.
Our Review
In 1997, the same year Mimi Rogers played Austin Powers' mother in the Mike Myers comedy that became a cultural phenomenon, she also starred in a made-for-TV Christmas movie about a perfume saleswoman whose holiday wishes go sideways. The Christmas List aired on The Family Channel on December 1, 1997, and has since settled into that cozy tier of 1990s holiday TV movies that people either remember with genuine affection or have never heard of at all.
The premise is deceptively simple. Melody Parris (Rogers) works behind the perfume counter at a Seattle department store. Her boyfriend George (Jano Frandsen) is pompous and noncommittal. Her mother Natalie (Stella Stevens) lives next door and won't stop pressuring her about marriage. She's been passed over for a promotion. Life, in short, is stuck.
At her friend Naomi's (Enuka Okuma) suggestion, Melody writes a Christmas list of everything she wants. Not a shopping list. A real, selfish, "if I could have anything" list. She drops it into the department store Santa's mailbox, and one by one, her wishes start coming true.
Be Careful What You Wish For: The Plot That Actually Works
The "wishes granted with strings attached" concept is ancient. It predates Christmas movies by centuries. But The Christmas List handles it with more care than you might expect from a TV movie that went from wrapping production on October 31 to airing 31 days later.
Melody gets her promotion. She wins a Ford Mustang convertible. A glamorous new suitor appears. Fuzzy slippers materialize. Her family agrees to celebrate Christmas Dickens-style. On paper, everything she wanted. In practice, each granted wish creates complications she didn't anticipate.
The movie's strength is that Melody isn't punished for wanting things. She's not greedy or selfish. She's a woman in her mid-thirties who is tired of settling, and the film treats that as completely reasonable. The lesson isn't "don't want things." It's closer to "know what actually matters to you before you ask for everything."
The Christmas List Movie Cast: Familiar Faces and One Surprising Name
Mimi Rogers carries this film. By 1997, she had already starred opposite Tom Berenger in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me, earned serious critical praise for The Rapture (1991), and worked with everyone from Jeff Goldblum to Mike Myers. She brings more presence to the role of Melody than a TV-movie perfume clerk typically gets.
Stella Stevens, who played opposite Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor (1963) and Dean Martin in The Silencers (1966), shows up as Melody's overbearing mother Natalie. She gets most of the comedy, and she's good at it.
Rob Stewart plays Dr. David Skyler, the love interest. He enters the story through his son Danny (Bill Switzer), a boy who visits the perfume counter wanting to buy a scent that reminds him of his late mother. That scene, where Melody helps Danny pick out the perfume and quietly covers the difference when he can't pay, is the emotional anchor of the whole movie.
Then there's Marla Maples as Faith, a wealthy, high-maintenance woman with her sights set on marrying a doctor. In 1997, Maples was still married to Donald Trump and making occasional acting appearances. Her role here is small but memorable as the romantic rival who's all ambition and no warmth.
A Hallmark Christmas List Before Hallmark Owned the Format
The Christmas List aired on The Family Channel, which would eventually become ABC Family and then Freeform. It wasn't technically a Hallmark movie, though it gets lumped in with that category constantly online. The confusion is understandable. It has every hallmark (lowercase) of the genre: a woman at a crossroads, a charming widower, a precocious child, a cozy retail setting, snow.
But it predates the Hallmark Christmas movie industrial complex by about a decade. When this film was made, the idea of producing 40 original Christmas movies per year hadn't occurred to anyone yet. The Christmas List was produced by Shavick Entertainment and Saban Entertainment, with talk show legend Merv Griffin serving as executive producer.
Director Charles Jarrott brought unexpected pedigree to the project. This was the same filmmaker who directed Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), a film that earned 10 Academy Award nominations and won Jarrott a Golden Globe for Best Director. By the late 1990s, he was working primarily in television, but his sense of pacing and shot composition gives The Christmas List a polish that many of its TV-movie peers lack.
Why It Still Works
The perfume counter setting is specific and grounded. You can almost smell the department store. The Danny subplot gives the film real emotional weight without becoming manipulative. And the central question, whether getting everything you want can actually make you happy, lands because Rogers plays Melody as genuinely conflicted rather than simply grateful or ungrateful.
It's not a perfect film. Some of the wish fulfillment sequences feel rushed (see: that 31-day post-production window), and Rob Stewart's Dr. Skyler could use about 40% more personality. But for a late-'90s TV Christmas movie, The Christmas List has a smarter script and better lead performance than it had any right to.
The film set in Seattle but shot in Vancouver has one last detail worth noting: the opening song is a holiday vocal arrangement of "A Time For Tony," a tune written by Merv Griffin himself back in 1963. The executive producer literally put his own song in the movie. That's the kind of Hollywood power move you can only admire.
Fun Facts
The film was shot in Vancouver, Canada, though the story is set in Seattle. Production wrapped on October 31, 1997, giving the team just 31 days of post-production before the December 1 premiere.
Director Charles Jarrott won a Golden Globe for Best Director for Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), which also received 10 Academy Award nominations. The Christmas List was among his final directing credits before his death in 2011.
Mimi Rogers appeared in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery the same year, playing Mrs. Kensington. She went from battling Dr. Evil to battling a Christmas wish list in a single calendar year.
Stella Stevens, who plays Melody's mother, was a former Golden Globe winner (New Star of the Year, 1960) who had starred opposite Jerry Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Dean Martin earlier in her career.
Marla Maples, who plays the role of Faith, was still married to Donald Trump during filming and was in the middle of a brief but active acting career that included roles in Executive Decision (1996) and Happiness (1998).
The opening song is a vocal holiday version of "A Time For Tony," written in 1963 by executive producer Merv Griffin, the legendary talk show host and media mogul.
The film originally aired on The Family Channel as part of its annual 25 Days of Christmas block. The channel later became ABC Family and then Freeform, but The Christmas List remained a recurring holiday broadcast for years.
Cast
