Natal em Santa Fé

The film did not them capture the true culture and traditions of Christmas in New Mexico. Not one reference to posole, red or green chile, biscochitos, or farolitos. The lowest point suggesting that tossing hams is traditional in Santa Fe. Give me a break!

True New Mexico food, art, and culture was represented with Mexican traditions, which are not prevalent in New Mexico. The movie only added confusion and assumptions to those outside New Mexico. Obviously, the writers and producers applied stereotypes that caused the audiences not to learn about the true New Mexican culture.

I lived in Santa Fe for many years. It is a unique and wonder filled place to live. The scenery for this movie brought back tons of memories. Which was great, but that and the good parts could not cover up the bad ones.

This could have been a good movie if not for the following...

1. Having Mario Lopez. Guy can't act.

2. Hank Chen. Ditto to #1.

3. How can you be in Santa Fe in winter and not show actual cold weather? It is over 7100 FT above sea level and in the middle of the mountains. Get your weather straight people. Adding coats doesn't cover it.

4. In the kids video dedicated to her grandmother, wait what is it that I hear?... The SIMS 3 music! Does EA know?

5. Anyone who can show any place in New Mexico at Christmas time and NOT include Biscochitos knows absolutely nothing about the holidays in NM!

The rest of the cast was great!

To the creators, in the future get your info straight. It is insulting to do otherwise.

Gia, Mario's daughter steals the show. Nice to see family emphasized. My son-in-law is Salvadorian and has 5 sisters. They took care of him during the Salvadorian civil war. I loved this movie and recommend it to anyone with family. I originally watched it to see Mario Lopez. I'm glad I did.

This movie roughly follows the formula where a business executive, Belinda, is sent to close a deal on buying a family owned store. It appears to be the usual "evil corporation" who will ruin everything good about the store. The movie didn't make it seem that important for the Ortegas to sell. There were no huge debts threatening foreclosure, but the case was made that business wasn't sustainable the way things were going. So Belinda meets Tony, played by Mario Lopez and the usual romance story based on this premise takes off.

It didn't seem like these were strangers starting a romance, but Lopez and Emeraude Toubia have chemistry right away. It always seems to me that Lopez is well aware that he is a big deal and that shows implicitly in the story. Yet he is so upbeat and friendly that you can ignore that. Toubia also is very upbeat.

There's a plot thread where Tony's sister Magdelena, played by Aimee Garcia, lacks confidence in her own abilities. She vacillates between fun and energetic vs a sad faced downer. I think this aspect was overplayed a bit by the writers or director.

The climax and ending is drawn out, but predictable.

Everything about Santa Fe culture is massively traditional here. We do make and eat a lot of tamales, that is true. But we do not eat mole or chile verde often. We are known for our unique chile and it is far different than mole or chile verde, where as chile verde is tomatillo based and mole is a complex sauce, our red and green chile, as its called, is a simple sauce of our unique pepper and almost nothing else, unlike mole which is up to 26+ ingredients. What a missed opportunity to order something Christmas and then brag to the girl about how good the chile is.

During Christmas in Santa Fe we make and eat biscochitos, a very special spiced shortbread cookie. We eat enchiladas. We eat chips and salsa. I have never seen a pepper eating contest on the plaza. If we had a winter fest it would be called winter "fiesta". We do not toss ham. We eat our ham with our families and red chile.

New Mexico truly does have a unique dialect that is interwoven with Spanish but not at all in the way it is portrayed in the film.

We are speak of our founding date as 1598, when Don Juan Oñate arrived here.

They kept saying how special it is here for Christmas but missed the mark on everything. Not one mention of farolitos, luinarias. No talk of posadas or the numerous farolito walks

A bunch of the little things they showed are Mexican like the papel picado, the corn husk flowers, the milagro hearts. Not even a single retablo or bulto was shown

They didn't even light the Christmas lights on the plaza.

Mario Lopez didn't even have a Zia tattoo on his neck/hand.

Empanadas are not really a staple of our cuisine as they lead us to believe. Maybe enchiladas would have been a better choice but there was ZERO mention of an enchilada at all. Billy the Kid was NOT jailed in Tia Sophias. The jail was actually where Collected Works is now at Galisteo and Water Street. Do we really have multiple donkey statues around that people steal the tails off of? I never knew that. I also never knew we had a sherif that wore a green and tan suit. (hint: we don't)

We do not have an antique Christmas truck that drives around and hand out presents. We have awesome low riders do that. Unrelated to Santa Fe, when the sister is making a glass ornament you see her "finish" without taking the piece off the pole and putting it in the annealer. Eye roll!! Come on! Who goes on a date at Rockin Rollers? The scorpion pepper is from Trinidad.