A Second Chance Christmas: The Movie You Knew as One More Christmas
If you have been keeping a running list of this year’s Great American Family movies, one line on it needs a correction.
The Candace Cameron Bure and Jonathan Scarfe movie that Great American Media announced back in March as One More Christmas is now called A Second Chance Christmas. The network’s own listing page carries the new title. Bure has been using it in her posts. Almost every roundup written before August still says One More Christmas, so if you have been searching one title and finding the other, that is why. Same movie, same cast, same cabin in the Smoky Mountains.
The new title is also a better description of what this one is doing.
Two exes and an ice storm
Anna (Bure) and James Campbell (Scarfe) have been divorced for five years. What used to be a happy marriage has settled into a polite arrangement they maintain for the sake of their kids, the kind where everybody knows the rules and nobody says much.
Then their daughter invites the whole family to her grandparents’ rustic Smoky Mountain cabin for Christmas so everyone can meet the boyfriend she is serious about. Anna and James both agree to go. Anna also decides to show up a day early to get ahead of the awkwardness, which is exactly what James decided to do.
So they are alone in the cabin. And then the worst ice storm in a decade closes the mountain, and neither of them is going anywhere.
That is a tight little setup. No misunderstanding to untangle, no city-versus-small-town lesson, just two people who already know each other completely and have to sit in a room with all of it.
Bure is calling it a faith story about do-overs
Bure has talked about this one more openly than she usually does before a premiere. In an Instagram video she described it as a story “filled with second chances, healing and the joy of rediscovering love,” and tied that directly to the movie’s faith message, saying she does not think you could get more on the nose biblically than a story about second chances.
Talking to Us Weekly, she framed it as being about marriage, family, and what happens when you get a do-over with more maturity and more faith than you had the first time.
She also said something about the genre worth noting. Her Christmas movies, in her words, are not just big-city-girl-meets-small-town-boyfriend anymore. Between this and the work she has been putting through CandyRock Entertainment, she is steering toward stories about repair rather than discovery. Reconciliation after a divorce is not a premise Great American Family or Hallmark reaches for often. It requires the audience to accept that both people got something wrong.
Who put it together
Bure executive produces alongside Jeffery Brooks, Ford Englerth, and Tim Owens at CandyRock. The script comes from Taylor Kalupa and Masey McLain, two names that regular Great American Family viewers will recognize from in front of the camera as well as behind it.
Scarfe is a smart bit of casting. He has the weathered, quiet presence that a fifteen-year marriage and a five-year silence actually need, which is a different job than playing the charming stranger.
Bill Abbott, Great American Media’s president and CEO, credited Bure with an instinct for material that reflects the network’s audience when the film was announced. She is headlining two Great American Christmas movies this year, this one and Sweet Christmas Anniversary, the third entry in the Home Sweet Christmas series with Cameron Mathison.
When you can watch it
Great American Christmas returns in October for its sixth year, across Great American Family, GFAM+, and Great American Pure Flix. A Second Chance Christmas is slated inside that run.
No specific date yet. Great American Family typically fills in its calendar a few weeks after Hallmark posts its full lineup, and Hallmark’s does not usually land until mid-September. Worth knowing: titles have been showing up on Pure Flix ahead of the broadcast premiere in recent seasons, so keep an eye out for a streaming date and an air date that are not the same night.
For comparison on the other side of the dial, Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas opens Saturday, October 17.
Our 2026 Christmas movie preview tracks Hallmark and Great American Family together so you are not chasing two calendars. If you want the other big Great American Family title in the mix, we wrote up A Christmas Prayer II, and our Great American Family hub has the rest of the slate.
Title changes usually mean nothing. This one reads like somebody in a marketing meeting looked at the finished film and realized the theme was sitting right there. We will post the premiere date here the moment Great American Family announces it.
Sources: Great American Family, PR Newswire, Movieguide.
