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Last week, I reported on a virtual tour that I took in London with the topic of Jane Austen’s Christmas. Tina is reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I got tired of Christmas rom-coms pretty early this year, so I decided to try a new animated Netflix movie that’s targeted to families, That Christmas.

That Christmas is set in Wellington-on-Sea, a British village beset by a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

Besides the weather, this village has a bunch of other problems. The new kid is lonely because his father is absent and his mother is overworked. Twin sisters couldn’t be more different from each other if they tried. A group of neighbor kids are bored by their families’ joint Christmas traditions.

An aside. One of the boring traditions is watching a Christmas movie. The movie is Love Actually. Yikes! I know that it’s fashionable to hate Love Actually, these days, but I still actually love it. Here’s a reminder, though: There are reasons why Love Actually is rated R. Parents, don’t watch this with your kids unless you’re prepared to explain how porn movies are made and what a foursome is.

The stories about how all of these problems are solved are heart-warming without being too sweet for modern kids. There are plenty of surprises in store for the characters and the viewers. Santa only provides a few of them. The villagers turn out to have the capacity to provide wonderments, too.

Adults will recognize some of the voices.

I first became aware of Jodie Whittaker when she played the mother of the missing child in Broadchurch. I also enjoyed her in Attack the Block and was delighted by her stint as Doctor Who. In That Christmas, she plays the overworked mother of the new kid in the village.

Speaking of Love Actually, Bill Nighy plays the lighthouse keeper in Wellington-on-Sea. Maybe they featured that film to honor Bill Nighy’s iconic role in it. I’ve enjoyed him more recently in Living, Hope Gap, The Bookshop, and Their Finest.

Fiona Shaw is a character actor with roles in Colette, Ammonite, Enola Holmes, and as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films. I’ve recently been enjoying her role in the spy series, Killing Eve. For That Christmas, she voices a character who has unexpected depth.

Have you seen That Christmas? What did you think?