Hallmark’s Next Stop Christmas immerses itself into a fantastical territory intermeshed with romantic undertones in this tale of time travel. The movie was released in 2021 with its stellar cast, including Lyndsy Fonseca, Chandler Massey, Eric Freeman, Lea Thompson, Erika Slezak, Christopher Lloyd, and more. The holiday season is never quite over without one indulging in touching content that feels like the cinematic equivalent of warm and hot chocolate with cold weather as the backdrop, with all fuzzy moments of your life replaying in your head.
This is why we landed on one such classic Christmas movie to uplift your blues. It’s time to pay a visit to the endearing filming locations of the movie once again and relive the soul-stirring emotions we felt after watching it for the first time.
Next Stop Christmas Filming Locations
The filming for the Hallmark Christmas flick began on August 23, 2021, in Connecticut. This sets Next Stop Christmas apart from most other movies of the same network as one of the major filming sites of previous Hallmark movies has usually been Canada.
The fictional locality of Shepard’s Ferry was nothing but the town of Chester (Connecticut) in disguise.
Deep River Landing in Connecticut was another place where the production of the movie covered a significant amount of time. Moreover, the symbolic train in the film is the Essex Steam Train in Essex.
Ironically, the temperature was quite high when the shooting was still ongoing despite the whole Christmas-y chill that can be seen in the final product.
A lot of local restaurants were also turned into filming hubs for quite a few sequences of the film. The ones to be included in the final takes were Grano Arso Restaurant, Simon’s Marketplace, and Otto Pizza. Salem’s Fir Patch Farm, a Christmas tree farm on Buckley Road, and Old Lyme, a town in New London County, offered two more ideal locations for the same.
Next Stop Christmas Storyline
Originally titled “The Christmas Train”, travels 10 years back in time. Angie boards it, mistaking it for her daily means of transportation. Her plans of spending the holiday all by herself are completely overturned as the train transports her back to 2011, where she’s compelled to face her past decisions and make the best of what she’s got. Will reliving her old love life encourage her to take charge of all the “What ifs” arising in her mind?
Is Next Stop Christmas Worth Watching?
Original Christmas movies sport an undeniable charm that pulls the audience in without exerting much effort. Next Stop Christmas leads with a similar example as the Hallmark Channel movie pulls on the strings of your heart. These holiday movies are essentially about the idea of people coming together, and what other way to celebrate that festive cheer other than introducing Romance into the mix.
The heartwarming film offers Angie, the protagonist, as well as the audience, a chance to dwell upon how one’s life would’ve drastically been different if only one were to opt for a different path in the past altogether. In Angie’s case, she’s also granted the opportunity to rather act upon such contemplations. The poignant essence of what hope is gets conveyed to us through the protagonist traveling back in time to find out what is truly important to her as opposed to the daily rigmarole of her mundane life that only seems to push her further into existentialist thoughts.
Here’s a sneak peek at the lovely movie!
