Review: “A Holiday to Remember” (1995)

Finally — appropriate winter wear! Coats, sweaters, scarves, gloves for Christmas in South Carolina.

Connie Sellecca dresses beautifully throughout — even in coats and leggings. Unlike most actresses who default to neutrals, Connie favors colorful wardrobes: bold cornflower coat, Smurf-blue twinset with leggings, zebra-print scarf.

Even her leopard-print jacket for church gets paired with a bold evergreen overcoat, injecting festive color into neutral-chic styling.

Randy Travis as country policeman wears appropriate jeans, flannel overshirts, and boots. That cable-knit sweater in a couple of scenes? Perfect! Guys in chunky sweaters create a sexy, downhome look!

Fresh from divorce, L.A. psychologist Carolyn returns to her South Carolina hometown with her unhappy teenage daughter. She’s inherited her grandmother’s house — which happens to be next door to the family of Clay Traynor, the man she jilted at the altar on their wedding day. She tells herself she’s over him, but constant encounters prove otherwise.

A sweet kiss following snowball fight shenanigans — she shoves snow down his shirt, he chases her outside, they both tumble into the snow, and nature takes its romantic course.

This comes after his proposal, when he talks her through all her reasons why it won’t work this time.

It’s a serious lip-lock they both execute beautifully, refuting any notion that only young actors in modern movies know how to kiss properly.

(Because seriously — very few modern young actors pull off basic romance-movie kisses!)

No real content concerns beyond some irritating ’90s PC gobbledygook that dates the production.

Honest truth? This movie would be 100% better without the little-boy subplot. His storyline adds nothing to the romance or overall narrative.

If they’d simply focused on a newly divorced mom and daughter establishing a new life where the jilted ex-fiancé still resides — adding perhaps some embarrassing or quirky town run-ins — this could’ve been a charming romcom.

That Christmas Story reenactment with William as a Wise Man? Painful. Not funny, not cute, and certainly not germane to the romance.

I’m old-fashioned — I admit it — and prefer heroes taller than heroines. It just looks better.

Randy Travis delivers decent downhome charm complementing Connie’s polished élan, but he’s either shorter or the same height, which affects kissing-scene dynamics.

When the woman stoops to kiss the guy… not ideal.

Connie’s tall, so she’d have been better suited to someone John Schneider’s, Bruce Boxleitner’s, or Barry Van Dyke’s height. Could any of them deliver Randy’s Southern charm? I don’t know (though Schneider did Dukes of Hazzard).

Authentic Southern accents are notoriously difficult even for American-born actors — and I know whereof I speak since all my family comes from the South (I’m first-generation California).

Speaking of accents: Connie has a faint New York or New Jersey accent when she should have Southern roots. Even after years in California, unless she actively worked to lose it, she’d retain some Southern drawl — and definitely no trace of New England!