‘A Merry Little Ex-Mas’ Answers One of Pop Culture’s Eternal Questions

Netflix’s 2025 feel-good holiday movie, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, answers one of pop culture’s greatest questions. What happens twenty years after the end of the Hallmark movie about the Big City Girl who moves to a small town for love?

For Kate (Alicia Silverstone), the answer is feeling trapped by the smallness of her life compared to the size of her ambition. She and Everett (Oliver Hudson) built their lives and raised their kids in picturesque Winterlight. Now that the kids are grown and flown, they’ve decided to “consciously uncouple.” Everett is the town doctor who has always prioritized his work over spending time with his family. Kate is looking forward to a final, merry Christmas together in their family home before announcing that she’s moving to Boston to finally pursue her dream career as an environmentally conscious architect.

She is aggressively into green technology, veganism, a crafty DIY lifestyle, and preaching against consumerism to the point of “OK, we get it already.” Silverstone’s Earth Mother vibe is so strong that she executive-produced an entire holiday movie about it.

Good for her. And good for Melissa Joan Hart, who has a producer credit and appears in the movie, though not nearly enough. Which is not something I ever thought I’d say. But as Kate’s boozy bestie, she knocks it out of the park with the limited screen time she gets. Her role is mostly handing people cocktails as they enter a scene and dropping a quip to move the story along. She also gets to squeeze Pierson Fodé’s (The Wrong Paris) biceps a couple of times.

I have no problem with Netflix making Fodé their go-to Hot Guy. He’s a very pretty doofus named Chet in this one. When Kate meets him, he’s playing Santa at a Christmas tree farm. He also works as an exotic dancer and volunteers for the town’s emergency services team. Both side gigs matter later.

Kate and Everett expected their “conscious uncoupling” to go smoothly, but moving forward with total honesty is easier said than done. Just before Christmas, Kate learns Everett is already dating someone. And that someone is Jameela Jamil. Always causing problems, that one.

Jamil plays Tess, a rich, metropolitan do-gooder who runs a global nonprofit that helps women start small businesses. Silverstone’s character runs a small handyman business, but somehow this never comes up between them. They spend most of their time awkwardly competing with each other, except for the scene where Tess tells Kate how foolish she was for throwing away a perfectly good man just as he was “Clooneying.”

Listen, I like Oliver Hudson well enough. He’s a good-looking guy and, honestly, almost too good an actor for this movie. But Clooney, he is not.

Everett is dating Tess, so Kate starts dating Chet in retaliation. And everything goes to hell in the most charming ways possible. All of Kate’s traditional, homespun Christmas rituals are ridiculed by her kids (newcomer Wilder Hudson and Emily Hall) because Tess has bought them shiny, new presents. The boyfriend her daughter brought back from Oxford (The Last Kingdom’s Timothy Innes) is an unbearably annoying Harry Potter tour guide she can’t relate to. There are so many bad Harry Potter jokes that Kate finally tells him to knock it off. None of this is even necessary because, toward the end of the movie, we learn he’s also a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. He could have been baking magnificent desserts the whole time. Instead, he’s waving a wand and shouting “Wingardium Leviosa” like a moron.

The only people Kate feels she has in her corner are Everett’s gay dads. The gay grandpas are pretty random, but also pretty great. Played by My Secret Identity’s Derek McGrath and The Cosby Show’s Geoffrey Owens, they feel like living Easter eggs for Gen-X and Elder Millennials. Neither actor is gay, to my knowledge, but I’ll allow it because they’re good sports about wearing ugly Christmas sweaters and being dressed like Gingerbread men.

The comedy of holiday-themed errors culminates in Everett giving Kate the “starter wife” speech. You know, the one about how he’ll be a better husband and father to his next family because of her. And it is not the compliment some people think it is. He gives Tess a terribly practical gift, and a fire burns down Everett’s Christmas tree, destroying a bunch of presents. This gives Chet the chance to rip off his tear-away tuxedo (see above note about exotic dancer side gig) to smother the flames.

All of this messiness solidifies Kate’s decision to return to her big city dreams. But then she realizes how much she loves her little town because… she inspired her son to… not go to college and become a firefighter so he can help people, like she does. I don’t know. I think you can go to college and also be a firefighter? But sure, OK, kid. You made your mom happy by writing something nice about her. See how easy that was? So Kate decides to stay in town, keep the house, and get back together with Everett.

When I left for college, my mom sold our family house and has lived in a series of apartments in The City ever since. So part of me was happy for Kate’s kids, knowing they still have a familiar home to return to. But the rest of me was screaming internally. Kate was right at the beginning of the movie. This adorable small town is a trap. A man who doesn’t realize how good a life he has until he loses it has learned a lesson too late. I was rooting for Kate to be happy in Boston, possibly with lunkheaded Chet. But I guess the rules of Christmas movies don’t allow that sort of growth. In Christmas Movie Land, small towns are the best towns, where all of your dreams come true as long as they aren’t too big.

I predict a sequel to A Merry Little Ex-Mas focusing on a family trip to England, where they’ll experience a culture clash with the Harry Potter boyfriend’s family next Christmas.

Until then, A Merry Little Ex-Mas is streaming on Netflix.