The Heart of Christmas (2011)
Told in flashback from the perspective of Megan, the storyline unfolds when her commitment to faith and family is renewed after reading the blog of Julie Locke, the online journal that Julie kept after her 13 months old Dax was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML).
rating 6/10 User rating 19 votes 62% ❄ Christmas Connection
The entire plot turns on an October neighborhood decision to decorate for Christmas early, giving a dying toddler his last chance to see the holiday he loves. Christmas lights, ornaments, gifts, and community generosity are not backdrop here but the actual mechanism of the story. This is as Christmas-specific as a movie gets.
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Our Review
In late October 2009, a neighborhood in Washington, Illinois started putting up Christmas lights. It was two months early. The reason was a two-year-old boy named Dax Locke, who had AML M7 leukemia, one of the rarest pediatric forms of the disease. His parents, Julie and Austin, weren't sure he would live to see December. So the neighbors lit up early. Then more neighbors joined. Someone made fliers. CNN picked up the story. Soldiers in Afghanistan put up Dax trees. Dax did make it to Christmas Day. He died on December 30, 2009, five days later.
That story is real. The 2011 TV movie The Heart of Christmas, directed by Gary Wheeler, is based on it. The movie is imperfect in the ways that faith-based films made on tight TV budgets usually are. It is also, at its core, about something genuinely extraordinary that actually happened to real people.
How a YouTube Video Became a Movie
The film exists because of a song. Christian singer-songwriter Matthew West wrote "One Last Christmas" about Dax Locke, and the accompanying video became one of the most-watched clips on YouTube in late 2010. A producer in Los Angeles saw it and decided the story needed to be a film. West was brought in to read a still-untitled script, and he wrote the new song "The Heart of Christmas" for the project, which then gave the movie its name.
West also appears in the film itself, playing a version of himself, which is an unusual creative choice that mostly works. His presence grounds the narrative in its musical origin and gives the film a documentary texture it wouldn't otherwise have.
The story follows Megan Walsh (Candace Cameron Bure), a career-focused mother who encounters the Locke family's situation while trick-or-treating with her own kids. The early Christmas decorations confuse her. When she learns why they're there, it changes her. George Newbern plays her husband, and Erin Bethea plays Julie Locke, the mother at the center of the real story.
What the Film Gets Right
The movie doesn't pretend Dax survives. That took courage for a family-friendly faith-based production. Genre conventions push hard toward the miracle; this one resists. Bethea's performance as Julie carries most of the emotional weight, and she handles the material with real restraint. The scenes inside St. Jude Children's Research Hospital show a ward where not every child is going to have a happy ending, which is the truth of that place.
Cameron Bure's character, Megan, is a fairly standard "woman who learns to prioritize family over career" arc. It's the weakest element of the script, and it's been done better in a hundred other holiday films. But she's a competent performer and doesn't embarrass herself.
The Christmas aesthetic is completely earnest. No irony, no winking at the camera. In October, a neighborhood covered in lights and decorations looks genuinely moving when you know why they're up. The film makes good use of that visual.
Where It Falls Short
Prayer scenes are the most consistent problem. Several of them feel staged in a way that breaks the naturalism the rest of the film is trying to maintain. When characters gather to pray in a hospital corridor, it reads less like a dramatization of something that happened and more like a message being delivered to the audience. The film trusts its story least in exactly those moments when the story needs no assistance.
The dialogue has the flat efficiency of television writing. Characters explain their feelings directly and often. The budget is visible in some of the supporting performances. These aren't dealbreakers for the audience this film is intended for, but they're honest limitations worth naming.
Some critics noted that the film occasionally feels like a St. Jude fundraising piece. That's a little uncharitable. St. Jude is where Dax was treated, and any honest account of the story involves the hospital. But those critics aren't entirely wrong that the film sometimes leans into the institutional relationship a bit heavily.
The Story That Needed No Embellishment
What the filmmakers had to work with was already complete. A dying child. A mother's blog that people around the world were reading. A neighborhood that covered itself in Christmas lights in October. A community that kept expanding outward: state, country, overseas military bases. And then a quiet end, five days after Christmas, with a two-year-old who got to see the holiday he loved.
None of that needed to be invented. The film's job was to not get in the way of it. Mostly, it doesn't. The "Decorate for Dax" movement, as it became known, happened without any planning or organization. A neighbor named the Hurtgens made fliers after seeing the Lockes' lights, and it spread from there. That is the kind of thing that sounds scripted and wasn't.
The Dax Locke Foundation was established after his death with an initial fundraising goal of $1.6 million for St. Jude. The foundation's motto, "Cherish Every Moment," comes directly from what the family asked people to take from Dax's story.
The Heart of Christmas is a modest film about an immodest act of communal generosity. It won't win any awards for craft. But Dax Locke was born on June 26, 2007, and he died on December 30, 2009, and for a few weeks in between, strangers on different continents turned on Christmas lights for him. The film remembers that. That's enough.
Fun Facts
Dax Locke was diagnosed with AML M7 leukemia, which is one of the rarest subtypes of acute myeloid leukemia in children. The family traveled to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, for treatment after exhausting options closer to home.
The "Decorate for Dax" movement began when the Hurtgen family, neighbors of the Lockes in Washington, Illinois, made and distributed fliers asking others to put up their Christmas lights early. What started as a single street spread internationally within weeks.
CNN covered the "Decorate for Dax" story in November 2009, which caused the movement to go viral. US soldiers deployed in Afghanistan reportedly put up Christmas trees in Dax's honor after seeing the coverage.
Matthew West wrote "One Last Christmas" after learning about Dax Locke, and the song's YouTube video becoming widely shared in 2010 directly prompted a Los Angeles producer to develop the film. West then wrote a second song, "The Heart of Christmas," which became both the film's title track and its name.
Matthew West appears as himself in the film, making the movie one of the few faith-based productions where the musician whose song inspired it also performs as a character in the dramatization.
Erin Bethea, who plays Julie Locke in the film, is best known for playing the female lead in Fireproof (2008), the Kirk Cameron-starring faith-based drama that became one of the highest-grossing independent films of that year with a $500,000 budget against $33 million in ticket sales.
Dax lived to see Christmas Day 2009 and died five days later, on December 30. He was two years and six months old. His parents had begun decorating early in October because doctors warned he might not survive to December.
The Dax Locke Foundation was established after his death with an initial fundraising target of $1.6 million directed toward St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The foundation operates under the phrase "Cherish Every Moment," taken from the message the Locke family asked people to carry forward.
Cast
