Hallmark Channel‘s new movie The Christmas Baby is the story of a two-woman couple whose lives are upended when a stranger leaves a baby at their doorstep. It’s a lighthearted tale about family and change—which just might be what we need right now.
Erin (Ali Liebert) and Kelly (Katherine Barrell) are married and happy with their lives and careers. Erin manages a mailing and shipping store; Kelly is the production designer for a community theater. Aside from a curmudgeonly neighbor, life is good. A few meaningful looks that Erin gives to a passing family with a baby, however, hint that she would like to be a parent someday, even though Kelly professes no interest.
One day as Christmas approaches, Erin is working late at the store, and finds that someone has left a baby carriage there—complete with baby and a note that indicates the birth mother specifically wants Erin and Kelly to raise the child, Nicholas. They’re not ready for this, but after a talk with a social services worker (Barbara Niven), agree to care for him until he can be placed elsewhere or his birth mother found.
Juggling two jobs and a newborn is challenging at the best of times, more so if one is caught unprepared. With a little assistance from their two eagerly helpful mothers, however (delightfully played by Rebecca Staub and Caitriona Murphy), as well as friends, they make a go of it. Kelly insists that the situation is only temporary, but Erin finds herself increasingly drawn to the child. Can they navigate this pressure on their relationship and the uncertainty about what will happen to Nicholas if his birth mother is found?
I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that Liebert and Barrell, who are queer themselves (although not a couple in real life), have a lively chemistry, both with each other and with Nicholas. I particularly like the scenes in which the women discuss how they think their lives would change if they became parents, which touches on concerns that may resonate for many viewers, queer and otherwise.
The supporting cast provides comedic touches as well as a sense of Erin and Kelly’s community. (And I’m assuming it was meant as deliberately ironic to make the one kid dressed as a blue dreidel in the community theater’s otherwise Christmas-y holiday show be the one to have the line, “Hey, everyone! Here comes Santa!” Sigh. I was often that lone, misunderstood Jewish kid in my peer group.)
This isn’t the first Hallmark movie to star queer foster parents; that honor, I believe, belongs to 2023’s Christmas on Cherry Lane, which featured a two-man couple. The Christmas Baby now sits among a growing list of queer-inclusive shows from the Hallmark Channel—a big change since the uproar in 2019 when it caved to pressure from a conservative activist group and pulled an ad featuring a same-sex wedding, then reinstituted it after LGBTQ people and allies spoke up. It’s great to see them continuing to give us queer-inclusive content.
The movie doesn’t delve deeply into the obstacles LGBTQ people may face in foster care and adoption, although Kelly muses briefly about why some people think her identity is “wrong.” There is also little here of the actual complexities and injustices often found within the real foster care system; those stories are thankfully being told elsewhere (See, for example, A Place Called Home and Safe: A Memoir Of Fatherhood, Foster Care, And The Risks We Take For Family.) The Hallmark Channel takes an upbeat approach to all of its shows, though, so it would have been odd if it treated a queer-inclusive one any differently.
Not every LGBTQ story needs to be about oppression and struggle, either. The mere fact of a Hallmark movie starring same-sex foster parents indicates a certain amount of political and social progress, and offers us needed representation. Many of the movie’s observations about parenting and family feel universal, too, quietly sending an important message that what unites different types of families is greater than what divides us.
The Christmas Baby offers us an entertaining and at times thoughtful story about family, connections, and what we can learn about ourselves and those around us when life brings us the unexpected. Maybe that’s enough, at least for a brief moment. We queer folks deserve our feel-good holiday movies just like anyone else, and The Christmas Baby gives us exactly that.
The Christmas Baby premieres Sunday, December 21, at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on Hallmark Channel and streams next day on Hallmark+.