Happy Howlidays: Movie Review

Puppy love thrown together with mature and dramatic themes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I was expecting Hallmark’s final movie of their 2024 Christmas Countdown to be more kid-friendly, especially when it’s titled Happy Howlidays and is about adopting a stray dog. Instead Happy Howlidays is more in line with a lot of their other offerings and focuses on two adults at a crossroads in life.		2024 Directed by: Terry Ingram Screenplay by: Terry Ingram Starring: Jessica Lowndes, Ezra Moreland
Mia (Jessica Lowndes) is at a career crossroads. She’s new to Seattle, working for a website with fluff piece local articles run by her only friend, while she hides out in her unrealistically beautiful home with dirty clothes strewn everywhere. She can barely take care of herself let alone a pet as she tells a stray dog that follows her home. Once again it’s time for my least favourite romance trope – the heroine and leading man are unnecessarily rude to each other upon first meeting and then find they are going to forced to be in each other’s company. Mia, not wanting a dog, takes her new found stray to the local dog shelter not-for-profit, where immediately upon entering the door can see that the person working was helping another customer and instead of just waiting like a normal person, she rudely starts demanding that she’s just dropping it off so she shouldn’t have to wait in line. I do not know why movie characters can’t act like human beings in Hallmark meet cutes. Max isn’t much better. He’s at a career and personal crossroads. He’s running the dog shelter charity like a czar – nobody is good enough to adopt a dog, refusing a nice married woman from getting a dog for her son, but then forcing Mia to keep her dog despite her openly saying she would be an unfit dog parent. Unsurprisingly Max’s charity is about to run out of money. Two quick thoughts – allow people to actually adopt dogs, and then move out of that ridiculously large, exceedingly nice location that is obviously way too expensive in rent for a small dog charity. The location scouts are not good at matching cost with situation. It is a nice location to film in though. Seattle is famous for its outdoor activity areas. And much of Happy Howlidays takes place on hikes and in parks. Mia’s dog (now named Russell) and Max’s dog named Jules have fallen in love and Mia used their dog love story for a website article. Readers fell in love with the two dogs and now Mia and Max are finding themselves thrown together in order to keep their two dogs together and dressed up for the holidays. The romance is solid as they do spend the entire movie getting to know each other. Eventually it’s revealed that Mia used to be a doctor and had a patient die, and Max used to have a fiancée who just ran out on him. Those are dramatic and mature storylines, especially Mia’s, that it doesn’t exactly fit the puppy love theme the movie is going for.