Christmas

Great American Christmas is Back With 18 New Movies

It’s that time of year again! Great American Family is back with 18 new Christmas movies the whole family can enjoy together.

This is the sixth annual Great American Christmas, and this year’s lineup features some of the biggest names in family-friendly Christmas entertainment.

Great American Family kicked off its Christmas programming on October 9, with new movies premiering through December 19. Great American Family will also have Christmas programming 24/7 on their channel through the end of the year.

Viewers will see many familiar faces, including Candace Cameron Bure, Danica McKellar, Mario Lopez, Tony Danza, Cameron Mathison, Jill Wagner, Trevor Donovan, Ryan Paevey, Merritt Patterson, Cindy Busby and Marcus Rosner.

Candace Cameron Bure Has Much to Celebrate

Candace Cameron Bure, affectionately known as the “Queen of Christmas,” is returning with two new Christmas films this year.

But that’s not the only thing she’s celebrating.

In April, Bure turned 50, and just recently became a grandmother to two grandbabies.

Her son Lev and his wife Elliott welcomed their son, Bond Leo, on August 4. Born 10 weeks premature and weighing just three pounds, Bond spent more than five weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit before going home.

Then, on October 6, Bure’s daughter Natasha and her husband, Bradley Steven Perry, welcomed a baby girl, Winnie Helaine.

Bure is thrilled about becoming a grandmother and has embraced her new nickname, “CandyGram.”

The Christian actress continues to use her platform to boldly promote faith and family.

This fall, Bure stars alongside Cameron Mathison in A Sweet Christmas Anniversary, premiering November 27. Bure is also starring in a second movie and executive producing a third Christmas movie this season on Great American Family.

More Favorite Stars Return

Danica McKellar is back with two new films, The Christmas Yes List on November 14 and The Greatest Christmas Gift on November 29.

Mario Lopez is making Christmas movies with the family this year. He stars alongside his wife, Courtney, and their son, Dominic, in Three Generations, One Christmas, premiering November 21. Tony Danza also stars in the movie.

Family and Faith Values

Several of this year’s movies have strong Christian themes.

A Christmas Prayer Tradition, premiering October 24, tells the story of a family answering the prayers of neighbors through acts of faith and kindness.

Making Christmas Bright, premiering December 12, features a church Christmas Angel Tree program and a story about serving others and following God’s lead.

These are the kinds of movies that make Great American Family such a great option for families.

At a time when so much of Hollywood’s entertainment is at conflict with Christian values, Great American Family is intentionally producing movies that celebrate faith, marriage and family.

We can all be thankful for wholesome Christmas programming that parents and grandparents can enjoy with their children and grandchildren!

This Christmas, let’s make sure to support entertainment networks that promote faith, family and the values we want to pass on to the next generation.

Great American Christmas 2026 Movie Premiere Schedule

Here are all 18 new Christmas movies, their premiere dates and the actors and actresses starring in them:

October 10: A Second Chance Christmas — Candace Cameron Bure and Jonathan Scarfe

October 17: Silver Bells at Christmas — Laura Osnes and Ryan McPartlin

October 24: A Christmas Prayer Tradition — Shae Robins and Christopher Russell

October 31: A Very Arctic Christmas — Jill Wagner and Cameron Mathison

November 7: Karen Kingsbury’s The Christmas Ring — Jana Kramer, Benjamin Hollingsworth and Kelsey Grammer

November 8: An Ozark Mountain Christmas — Brianna Cohen and Jonathan Stoddard

November 14: The Christmas Yes List — Danica McKellar and Sam Page

November 15: Christmas at Moose Lake — Britt Robertson and Ryan Paevey

November 21: Three Generations, One Christmas — Mario Lopez, Tony Danza and Courtney Lopez

November 22: Letters This Christmas — Ashley Newbrough and Jesse Hutch

November 27: A Sweet Christmas Anniversary — Candace Cameron Bure and Cameron Mathison

November 28: A Christmas Rescue — Trevor Donovan and Stephanie Bennett

November 29: The Greatest Christmas Gift — Danica McKellar and Matthew Marsden

December 5: The Christmas Ornament Library — Merritt Patterson and Ryan Paevey

December 6: Christmas by the Spoonful — Laura Vandervoort and Olivier Renaud

December 12: Making Christmas Bright — Jillian Murray and Liam McIntyre

December 13: A Very Evergreen Christmas — Katie Leclerc and Jeremy Guilbaut

December 19: Christmas Wrapped in Love — Cindy Busby and Marcus Rosner

All movies premiere at 8 p.m. E.T. on Great American Family and are available earlier on Great American Pure Flix.

Learn more about this year’s movies and how to watch at Great American Family.

Get the printable movie schedule here.

Advent and Why the Christian Faith is Inherently Gendered and Binary

It is difficult to come up with a new angle on the significance of Christmas for believers as we strive to faithfully live out our lives in the modern age, but here is an important one.

Advent, the season where we look toward the first and second coming of our Savior, reminds us of a very important and inherent truth in our Christian worldview if we just dig deep enough.

That truth is that the Christian faith and story is inherently gendered and binary. In an age where both of these fundamental truths are under vicious attack today, being reminded of this fact is critical to Christian fidelity.

The First Coming

Let us look at the first coming of Jesus, fully God/fully man, at Christmas. We are told in John 1:14:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

In the telling of God becoming flesh, Scripture also tells us unmistakably that this happened in a gendered way.

A Son came from the Father. Maleness is inherently part of this divine story. Christianity is often criticized for being a patriarchal, male-centric faith. But this conclusion can only be arrived at through a superficial and short-sighted understanding of God’s incarnation.

We must ask, “How did God, the Word, become flesh?”

He came to us from the Father as God’s only Son through … the most thoroughly feminine part of a woman. God became man through woman. That is the fundamental fact of Christianity’s origin. Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother, makes this crystal clear in Luke 1:42-43:

… and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

The Word made flesh came intimately into our realm from the bosom of the Father, through the womb and birth canal of a woman. Jesus did not arrive in the world in a manger. That was secondary. God entered through the most intimate means of femininity. That is a profoundly feminist statement, in the best, truest sense of that term. No other faith or ideological belief system gives such high honor of place to that which is most feminine.

Yes, the Christmas story, and Christianity, originates in a very gendered and binary way.

But let us also look at the second coming of Jesus. It is also gendered, binary and … rooted in marriage.

The Second Coming

Elizabeth’s son and Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, tells us in John 3:29 that he is “the friend of the bridegroom” who is seeking His bride. John is, of course, referring to Jesus, the Word made flesh.

And Jesus’ return at the end of time is no less than a wedding, a glorious nuptial union between a divine Bride and Groom, Christ and His Church. It is what God’s whole story has been moving toward, after all. We read this toward the end of Revelation:

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure — for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.

For the marriage of the Lamb has come. Revelation 21:9 says, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.”

Christianity starts with a Heavenly Father and a real, earthly mother who bring us our Savior. It ends, culminating with a Groom, bound to His Bride.

We read in the first chapter of Scripture that the image and likeness of God in creation is humanity in male and female:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Gendered. Binary.

The culmination of time, which we also look forward to in Advent, reflects this male/female nature in a divine way in the masculine Bridegroom who takes His Beloved unto Himself, impregnating her with the seed of His eternal life-giving love. She, the Church, receives that life in the Person of the Holy Spirit and it flowers forth in new life of a great multitude, the redeemed of God, who we just read of in Revelation. This is what Revelation 21:2-3 speaks of in the finality of time:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

This divine gendered and binary truth, this glorious wedding, is what Advent is pointing us toward. It is the beginning of and the finality of the Christian story.

We should all keep these essential facts of the Christian narrative and worldview in mind when we hear the truth of the gender binary being attacked and dismissed in our culture today. It is an assault on truths much larger and significant than most assume.

 

Image from Shutterstock.

The Rich Theology of Christmas Carols

Scripture portrays the Incarnation as an act of war against Satan, sin, and death. God taking on flesh is at the center of the cosmic conflict between good and evil; a battle for a world never fully lost by God but recaptured in the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ Jesus. 

Of course, that part of the Christmas story tends to be missing from the 24-hour holiday music stations, most Christmas plays and pageants, and many Christmas Eve sermons. However, there is a source that continues to confront people with the whole Gospel, offering clear teaching about the redemptive realities of this holy season. Christmas carols are incredible teachers of theology and worldview. 

For example, the “Wexford Carol”:

Good people all, this Christmas time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done
In sending his beloved son
With Mary holy we should pray,
To God with love this Christmas Day
In Bethlehem upon that morn,
There was a blessed Messiah born

 The traditional English carol, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” powerfully describes the rescue mission that was the Incarnation:

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
When we were gone astray
Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy

 With haunting beauty, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” situates the coming of Christ within the context of God’s Old Testament promises:

O come, O come, Thou Lord of Might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times didst give the law,
In cloud, and majesty, and awe.
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save
And give them victory o’er the grave.

Few hymns offer as rich a Christology as “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” a brainchild of the great hymn-writer Charles Wesley and also, in part, the great revivalist George Whitefield.

Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see,
hail the incarnate deity
Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel
Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus, our Immanuel
Hail the heaven born Prince of Peace,
hail the sun of Righteousness Light
life to all he brings, ris’n healing in his wings
Christ the highest heaven adored,
Christ the everlasting Lord
Come desire of nations come, fix in us thy humble home
Come desire of nations come, fix in us thy humble home

 “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” describes clearly how the cosmic battle will eventually turn out:

And in despair I bowed my head: “There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song Of Peace on Earth Good Will toward Men,”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: “God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men,”
Till, ringing singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime, Of peace on earth, good will to men!

These songs, and others, remind us of essential Christmas truths: that this world belongs to God, that our plight of sin is not wholly lost, that the world’s captivity to Satan’s schemes is not the end of the story, and that God working through the ages has promised redemption. Through Patriarchs, prophets, and kings, He has fulfilled the promises given so long ago, in the wonders of the Incarnation, the fear and hope of Mary and Joseph, and the realization and glory of angelic hosts proclaiming their king, and ours.

Each year these hymns remind us that God has not left us in a broken state but came and lived among us so that He might die for us. In these songs are the whole gospel of God. And, as comforting and instructive as they are to us, at what other time of the year do otherwise disinterested friends, neighbors, and family members find themselves humming along with theology? 

A colleague once observed that Christmas is an opportunity to emulate the witness of Philip to the Ethiopians. The world around us hides under vain pleasures and false narratives, but they know that things are not quite right. What they need to hear is how things can be made right in Christ Jesus. By singing our way through Christmas, we can share with the world what it most needs to know.

President Trump Expands Christmas to 3 Day Federal Holiday

Thanks to President Trump, federal workers will have an extended Christmas holiday this year.

In an executive order signed on Thursday, President Trump declared:

All executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall be closed and their employees excused from duty on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, and Friday, December 26, 2025, the day before and the day following Christmas Day, respectively.

In recent years, depending upon what day of the week Christmas falls, presidents have made similar pronouncements. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush declared Christmas Eve a half-day for federal employees. In 1997, President Clinton declared Friday December 26th a federal holiday. Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Biden added to the Christmas holiday, too. During his first term, President Trump either declared Christmas Eve or the day after a federal holiday – but not both.

Yet, it might surprise you to learn that Christmas hasn’t always been widely celebrated in America – and sometimes not at all.

In fact, we credit the Pilgrims with popularizing the celebration of Thanksgiving, but that same year they refused to celebrate Christmas. In the wake of the English Revolution, the Puritans rebelled against King Charles I and cancelled any public acknowledgement of Jesus’ birthday.

In 1867, a Massachusetts minister named Increase Mather pointed out that the pagans were responsible for Christians celebrating Christmas on December 25.“Christ was not born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”

The “Puritan War on Christmas” resulted in all kinds of controversy and even arrests for those who tried to celebrate. It only fully abated after Christmas was designated a federal holiday in 1870. Up until that point, many businesses and stores remained open and life for many on December 24th and 25th was no different than it was on December 26th or 27th. Even schools kept going in New England states during Christmas.

Representative Burton Chauncey Cook of Illinois is credited with introducing the bill to federalize Christmas. In the aftermath of the Civil War, officials were eager to find ways to unify the country. President Ulysses Grant signed the holiday into law on June 28, 1870.

In an increasingly secularized country, it’s not an insignificant development that the President of the United States is setting aside three full days to celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Whether the holiday commemorating the greatest story ever told about the greatest man who ever lived should receive one, two, three or even more days might be a matter of personal opinion and conviction. But we can all agree that the Incarnation was a miraculous, world-shaking event that not only changed everything – but has hopefully changed you, too.

Strong and Free Christians Make for a Strong and Motivated Military

Christmastime at the Pentagon looks a bit different this year.

On Wednesday, Admiral Carey Cash, Chaplain of the Marine Corps and Deputy Chief of Chaplains of the Navy, opened an event at the headquarters of the United States Department of War, by describing the birth of Jesus in theologically rich terms.

Admiral Cash called Christmas, “the coming of Jesus into this world,” the “greatest rescue operation of all time.” He then quoted from the Gospel of John: “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (1:4).

Wednesday’s celebration coincides with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s call to overhaul the Chaplain Corps – a branch of the Army that dates to 1775. Secretary Hegseth announced plans to reprioritize the spiritual health of the country’s soldiers. He said there needs to be a “top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as physical and mental health.”

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward acknowledged that George Washington launched the program because he understood the link between a soldier’s faith and their ability to perform in dangerous and high-pressure situations. In reimagining the military’s commitment to providing a link to the eternal, Woodward suggested the change was long overdue.

“Past administrations degrade this vital ministry into a vague program of ‘feelings management,’ rather than a rigorous grounding in authentic, selfless, and courageous faith,” he shared. “I am grateful for Secretary Hegseth’s clear-sighted leadership and decisive action to ensure the Chaplain Corps and the Army Spiritual Fitness program are restored to their full strength.”

At Wednesday’s event, Franklin Graham held nothing back.

“Jesus took our shame, and He died in our place, and He rose again, And this is why we celebrate,” Franklin Graham declared. “Christmas was not a ‘Jesus Christ is a babe in a manger.’ He’s living, He’s alive, He’s in heaven, and He’s coming back, and He’s coming back someday soon.”

Hundreds of guests attended the service, which was held in the Pentagon Couryard in the glow of a brightly lit evergreen tree. Matthew West and Anne Wilson provided the Christmas music.

“I want to thank you all for sharing in this first Christmas Worship Service here at the Pentagon,” Secretary Hegseth told those gathered. “It’s the least we could do in this season. We do it monthly as well — a prayer service — which we will continue to do, because, as George Washington did that first year, he went on bended knee for providence in impossible tasks.”

He continued:

You each day are asked to do impossible things, work impossible hours, at impossible odds, which mere men and women could not do,” he told those gathered. “And that’s why we bend the knee, because we know where our strength comes from, and we need that wisdom and that guidance, that providential guide in our own lives as we try to act on behalf of our nation.

By strengthening the Chaplain Corps, Secretary Hegseth is simultaneously strengthening every man and woman in every branch of the military. That’s because strong Christians make for strong and courageous members of the armed forces.