All that seven-year-old Hallie (Birch) wants for Christmas is to reunite her parents, who divorced when Mom (Kozak) decided that the nifty, fifties-style diner Dad (Sheridan) wanted to open wasn't yuppie enough for her (funny, wasn't it yuppies who invented those places?). Spurred on by Mom's imminent plans to marry her officious boyfriend (Nealon), Hallie's thirteen-year-old, girl-crazy brother Ethan (Randall) does his best to make this wish come true.
Clearly meant to be adorable, the kids crack jokes like screenwriters rather than children, and the plot is just as contrived as the self-conscious dialogue. Judging by his loft, Dad is making a darn good living at the diner and since Mom and Dad still seem to be in love with each other and the boyfriend is such a jerk, where's the conflict?
This is the film that new Paramount studio head Brandon Tartikoff rushed through production so fast that snow had to be manufactured in the midst of a Los Angeles summer for the appropriate seasonal look. Although it isn't good, in all honesty, it's not much worse than any number of Hollywood holiday releases that had longer production times.