Adopting St. Nick Hands Amy Groening the Lead After a Decade of Best Friends
Hallmark is premiering a Christmas movie on Halloween night. That is the first interesting decision here. The second is who it gave the lead to.
Amy Groening has spent roughly a decade as one of the most reliable supporting players in this business. The best friend. The sister. The coworker with the good line. Her Hallmark credits run through Project Christmas Wish, Snowkissed, We Wish You a Married Christmas, A Dash of Christmas, The Santa Summit, Miracle in Bethlehem, PA, ’Twas the Date Before Christmas and Because of Cupid, and in nearly all of them she is the one standing slightly to the left of the poster.
Adopting St. Nick puts her in the middle of it. It premieres Saturday, October 31 at 8/7c.
A hardware store, a retirement community, and a resident who looks familiar
Maren runs her late father’s hardware store and is carrying most of her life alone. Her adopted daughter Leah signs up for a Christmas Companions program at a new retirement community, which pairs kids with residents for the season. Leah is matched with Kris, a resident who bears what Hallmark’s own copy calls a striking resemblance to Santa, and who it describes as “the suspiciously jolliest” of the bunch.
Signing Leah up means Maren has to deal with Reid, the program’s director, a man whose whole pattern is not staying anywhere long. He is good at showing up for other people and has no idea what to do when someone shows up for him. Maren has the same problem from the opposite direction: she will help anyone and accept help from no one.
The season works on both of them. Hallmark’s framing is that Maren learns it is okay to let others in, and the open question hanging over the ending is where Reid’s next assignment sends him.
Groening’s other claim is a Canadian Screen Award nomination
She is Winnipeg-based, and outside the holiday-movie circuit she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards for the indie film Bone Cage, playing Chicky. She has no series regular roles on her record, which makes the arc here unusual: she built a career entirely out of films and guest work, one part at a time, and the lead arrived on the back of volume and consistency rather than a breakout.
Hallmark has not said this is her first leading role for the network, and no outlet has called it either, so take that as the shape of it rather than a confirmed milestone.
Michael Rady has done thirteen of these now
Rady is a Christmas movie institution at this point, with twelve prior Hallmark films and six of those holiday titles: Christmas in Homestead, A Joyous Christmas, Christmas at Pemberley Manor, Two Turtle Doves, The Christmas Bow and Where Are You Christmas?, plus Cloudy With a Chance of Love, Love to the Rescue, You’re Bacon Me Crazy, A New Year’s Resolution, Unexpected Grace and Catch of the Day.
Worth noting for anyone who assumes he is a franchise guy: he is not. No Signed, Sealed, Delivered, no Mystery 101, no recurring Hallmark character at all. What he has is thirteen separate movies and a reputation for making the male lead feel like an actual person.
Before Hallmark he was Kostas in both Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants films, then Jonah Miller on Melrose Place, Luther Wainwright on The Mentalist, Coleman on season two of UnREAL, Nicholas Keynes on Timeless, and Dr. Matt Cooper on Chicago Med. He studied theater at Temple, and he and his wife have four children, which may be useful preparation for a movie set in a building full of people who want to talk to you.
Taylor Blake plays Leah and Randy Apostle plays Kris. Neither has published credits available, and Hallmark has not announced a director or writer.
The Halloween night question
Putting a new Christmas premiere against trick-or-treating is a real gamble. A good part of the audience is out that evening. What Hallmark is betting on is the people who are home, plus the long tail: this movie will air a dozen more times between November and Christmas, and an intergenerational story about not having to carry everything alone is exactly the kind that holds up on the fourth viewing in mid-December.
It also means October closes with back-to-back films featuring actors who once shared a movie. Rhiannon Fish, who leads Who’s Coming for Christmas? the night before, appeared with Rady in You’re Bacon Me Crazy in 2020.
When to watch
Adopting St. Nick premieres Saturday, October 31 at 8/7c on Hallmark Channel, streaming the next day on Hallmark+. The full Countdown to Christmas schedule covers all 34 titles.
Hallmark spends a lot of the season on people falling in love with strangers. This one is about a woman learning to let a room full of people help her, which is a harder thing to dramatize and a more useful thing to watch in December.
Sources: Hallmark Channel, Countdown to Christmas 2026 preview, TVLine.
