Best movies like A California Christmas

To inherit her father's company, socialite Ellen must first visit his small hometown, where she learns the value of hard work and helping others.

At the height of her career, investigative journalist Hannah Dunbar finds herself wondering what would have been had she stayed with the love of her life, Ben, 10 years before. When Santa Claus hears her “what ifs?” as a Christmas wish, he transports Hannah to a version of her life where she and Ben started a family.

While uncovering who is behind the random acts of Christmas popping up around her city, investigative journalist Sydney meets a competing reporter, Cole, who ignites her Christmas spirit and captures her heart, but may not be the man he claims to be.

Event planner Rachel lands her biggest job yet – Dollywood's 30th Smoky Mountain Christmas celebration, where she’s teamed with operations director Luke to plan an event as glamorous as Dolly Parton herself. Sparks fly, but it takes matchmaking by Dolly to help them find their way.

The dairy farm Emily has been running since her father passed away has fallen on hard times. When Emily’s sister, Dorothy, and her handsome business partner, Charlie, show up with a proposition to sell the farm, Emily comes up with an ingenious plan to buy out her sister's shares. She holds an online holiday ice cream flavor contest that goes viral with the help of a key ingredient, Charlie's amazing apple pie. Still, as the Christmas Eve deadline for the buyout approaches, Emily needs a Christmas miracle to save the family farm and her father's legacy.

Candace, daughter of lifestyle mogul Liz Livingstone, has never lived up to her mother’s standards. When a young girl posts a video begging Liz to help arrange a special Christmas party, Candace is sent in her place. As she struggles to prove herself worthy of running the company, Candace meets—and begins falling for—the girl’s uncle, a reporter writing an expose on her.

As a little girl, Melanie Hogan wished to find her own prince charming just like her parents found true love. Now an adult, Melanie is running her own bakery and dating a handsome CEO, Justin. Although things seem perfect when Justin asks Melanie to spend the holidays together at his beautiful lake house upstate—and meet his mother. Melanie finds herself spending more time with Justin’s best friend and loyal assistant, Dean, who just might be harboring a secret crush on her. When complications arise that throw Melanie and Dean together over the holiday, will the two realize they're meant to be?

Aubrey Lang, a travel and lifestyle blogger, goes to the little town of Solvang for her next holiday vlog piece after it’s voted Most Christmassy Town in the USA. She soon meets Sawyer Larsen, a local community coordinator and chocolate shop owner assigned to show her around the small town. At first, the unlikely pairing is at odds but soon start to fall for each other amidst the twinkling lights of the romantic little Danish village.

Bride-to-be Jessie Patterson calls off her third engagement - during the ceremony! She swears off serious relationships, until she meets and is pursued by Aiden MacTiernan. Aiden, on the other hand, has bet his friends he is marriage material, and can find a fiancé in the four weeks leading up to Christmas. When Jessie and Aiden begin to fall for each other, Jessie must decide if she is ready for serious love, and Aiden must decide if his bet is worth risking his relationship with Jessie.

Eve is a Christmas movie fanatic and dreams of having a movie-perfect Christmas with a movie-perfect boyfriend. On Christmas Eve, when Eve and her cynical sister Lacy make wishes to Santa, they wake up in Christmas Town and find themselves trapped inside a Christmas movie where they are the stars. But when things start to go wrong, and Eve's knowledge of all things Christmas movie fails to fix things, Eve and Lacy try to find a way out of the picture-perfect Christmas and back to reality.

Claire (Alexandra Breckenridge), a savvy venture capitalist from New York City, escapes to a quaint town in Vermont for the holidays and becomes a guest of the Fortenbury Bookstore. Upon arrival, Claire finds Christmas celebrations have been canceled by the town after a flood and the bookstore is in a dire state of disrepair. She immediately takes on the challenge to revitalize the store, but clashes with the owner, Andrew (Jamie Spilchuk), who initially rejects all her proposed improvements. Eventually, sparks fly as the two begin a budding romance, and Claire’s infectious optimism inspires Andrew to join her in reviving the yuletide spirit. But everything comes to a screeching halt when Claire discovers that Andrew is planning to sell the bookstore in the New Year. Will the spirit of Christmas be enough to change Andrew’s mind and encourage him to follow his heart?

Follows Callie and Joseph one year after they fell in love, now running a dairy farm and winery, but their romance is threatened when business and family obligations call Joseph back to the city.

Former classmates Lina and Max are traveling home for the holidays, until a storm hits and they have to work together to make it home in time, no matter the mode of transportation.

Charity, an ambitious reporter, learns the true meaning of Christmas when she investigates Erik Gallagher, a beloved member of the town who insists all the gifts he provides every Christmas are from none-other than Santa himself.

When Lucy wakes up with a wedding dress in hand, she believes that she is late to her wedding with her ex-boyfriend Zac. However, she has no recollection of the past 2 years, including the fact that she is engaged to another man.

Lydia, a successful professional organizer, is constantly trying to grow her business, but even her ambition takes a back seat to love when she meets Robert, a frazzled widower with two young children. A toy inventor, Robert is asked to present his new Christmas toy line to a superstore. His challenge is he only has 12 days to get his life and his business in order. Talk about a Christmas rush! Lydia shows Robert that this task goes way deeper than messy junk drawers and encompasses every aspect of his life. While she’s intent on helping him straighten out details he had long ignored, Robert teaches the buttoned-up Lydia that messiness can be a delightful part of life.

A bubbly bride-to-be’s Christmas plans take an unexpected turn when her holiday flight to New York is detoured and she encounters a cynical bar manager who has lost his faith in love. As she scrambles to make it back east for Christmas—and plan her upcoming wedding—she begins wondering if she’s marrying the right man, and learns a surprising lesson about love.

When Anna Parisi, an unemployed fine arts painter, is unable to make ends meet, she is hired to become a personal Christmas shopper for Marc, an uptight corporate exec. As they begin working together, Marc learns that Christmas giving has less to do with the amount of money spent and more to do with the importance of the gift, while Anna discovers she might find success as an artist in a way she never expected. The best gift of all of course is the love they discover with one another.

When Lacey takes a rare break from work for her friend Ava's Christmas Eve wedding, she reconnects with her former flame, Ean. The two decorate the cottage where the newlyweds will spend their honeymoon – a cottage said to bring true love to anyone who stays there – and feel their chemistry return.

Los Angeles television producer Maggie Baker unwittingly falls for Danny Wise, the son and former producer of his mother’s popular annual Christmas special Julia Wise Lifestyle. When Maggie’s secret plan to reunite Danny and his two brothers with Julia during the live broadcast in Vermont goes awry, Maggie is reminded that above all, it is the love for family and friends that makes the merriest of Christmas.

Lifestyle guru and romance expert, Joanna Moret, has developed a fool-proof strategy for ending holiday loneliness and it's all detailed in her best-selling book, The Love Audit. After appearing on a morning show, she is offered the biggest opportunity of her career—to throw the MacAllen Holiday Gala—and if all goes well she'll get her own TV show. Little do her fans, or the MacAllen's, know that she is newly single and can't seem to apply her principles to her own love life. Joanna asks the morning show producer, Ted to pretend they are a couple or risk being exposed as a fraud.

Jules has just inherited a quaint magical Christmas-themed village and Christmas tree farm bequeathed her by her grandmother. She plans to sell it and use the profits to buy her dream home in New York City. But the longer Jules stays on the farm and the more she learns how important Christmas Land has been to so many families, the more Jules starts to question her motives to sell.

Author Nell Phillips’ first book has become a surprise best-seller of the Christmas season. Nell’s last stop on a nationwide book tour takes her to the town of Springdale, the hometown of Emmett Turner, a young man she met over five years ago while both were junior copy editors at a New York publishing company. Nell was hurt when Emmett stood her up for a dinner date and then disappeared from New York without any explanation. As Nell is quick to admit, Emmett’s colorful, nostalgic anecdotes about Springdale inspired her to write this book that is shaping her life and especially this holiday season.

Sophie Bennett begins a new holiday tradition of spending every holiday at the Evergreen Inn and Ski Lodge, which she inherited from her parents. Evergreen Inn is a special place filled with people who cannot make it home for the holidays or who have had such wonderful experiences that it has become their home-away-from-holiday-home. This Christmas, Sophie will meet an unforgettable family, and her own life will be forever changed.

Charlotte Hart, a distinguished journalist, is spending time with her family over the holidays when a real estate developer approaches their small town with quite an offer. Skeptical and looking for the real scoop, Charlotte drives to see the real estate head honcho to question him. While she's en route, she gets into a terrible car accident and wakes up in the hospital only to realize that her body is in a coma, but her spirit is very much awake. She meets another spirit, who just happens to be the greedy developer. It turns out that he was on the other end of the accident and he too is in a coma. With only a few days left before the town votes on the development, Charlotte must try to change the minds of the developer and the town, but that is no easy task when no one can see or hear her. Will her voice be heard?

A doctor returns home for Christmas to find that her father has decided to retire from his own practice. After reuniting with her high school sweetheart, she wonders if she should stay and take over her father's practice.

Christmas in the Smokies is a modern day Christmas classic set in the beautiful Smoky Mountains. It tells the story of one family's journey to save their historic berry farm against all odds during one fateful holiday season.

Maddie, a high-powered marketing executive, is on her way to a client’s wedding but her plans are derailed by car trouble. When a fork in the road leads her to Christmas Valley, a town in love with Christmas, an unexpected encounter and a group of strangers that start to feel like family will have her questioning what she’s really been missing in life.

An injured figure skater is sent to the mountains to recover from an injury. Once there, she meets an ex-hockey player and his young daughter and begins to realise that something is missing from her life.

As Christmas approaches, Paula, a St. Louis antique appraiser, reluctantly accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Daniel, a career-focused attorney. When her Aunt Jane senses she has mixed emotions over the engagement, she invites Paula to her Nantucket home. Upon her arrival, Paula plans a trip to the nearby island of Martha's Vineyard where she meets a charming inn owner.

Pop superstar Adelaide Kay is so fed up with her controlling manager that she sneaks off the tour bus after their latest squabble. Though exhilarated to be free, she finds herself stranded in the freezing cold of a Pennsylvania winter, with no money and no plan. A local family, the Lapps, take her in. They know the true meaning of the season, even if they’re close to losing their dairy farm. No one in the family recognizes Adelaide except Dillon, the oldest son. He figures she’s the ticket to fast cash and plots to snap photos of Adelaide around the farm and sell them to the tabs. What he doesn’t plan, however, is their mutual attraction.

Lori stages homes for a living and her busiest season is Christmas! Though she normally only stages homes that are for sale, she’s intrigued when a wealthy widower named Elliot asks her to stage his home for the holidays to cheer up his daughter, Maddie. As Lori spends more and more time with Elliot and Maddie, she starts to feel like part of the family.

Lauren and her best friend Colleen think they have landed their dream job – giving people the best and most magical Christmas ever as their personal ‘Christmas Coaches.’ This holiday season promises to be their biggest ever when they land a royal client, the Anderson family, who has moved from England. When Lauren meets James, the eldest son, he wants nothing to do with planning Christmas as he’s busy negotiating a big acquisition for his father’s company. But Lauren won’t be thwarted in helping this royal family embrace the true spirit of Christmas. The more she prods James about their family holiday traditions the more he opens up. Sparks start to fly but she faces competition in the form of an old childhood friend and business colleague of James. Now Lauren must win his heart while giving the Andersons their best Christmas ever.

Sarah Davis heads to her uncle’s struggling ranch to escape New York and the spotlight from a recent breakup. Returning home for the first time since her aunt passed, complications arise when Graham, an entitled Hollywood star, arrives at the ranch to prepare for his next film. As Sarah and Graham start to bond, Sarah may get more for Christmas than she bargained for.

Darcy has always worked hard to prove herself and be successful on her own terms, even choosing to start her own company, rather than work with her father. Returning to her hometown for Christmas, Darcy reconnects with an old rival, restaurant owner Luke, and they are forced to plan a charity event together. As Darcy spends time with her family and Luke, she starts to realize what matters most in life and sets out to mend her relationship with her father, and possibly fall in love.