The single best Christmas movie my wife and I ever watched together was a movie - I believe the title was I Will Always Love You (or something like that), starring Patty Duke and Stephen Dorff.
It was about a young teenager who was adopted as a toddler by a well to do family. Right after his 16th birthday, and only about 6 weeks or so before Christmas, the lawyer who arranged his adoption was arrested for kidnapping and selling babies for adoption.
He never knew he was adopted till he overheard his parents talking that night about the arrest. They used that lawyer for his adoption, but never had any idea that the baby they adopted might be a kidnapped child.
The teenager had a part time job working for the lawyer, so he used his access to break into the lawyer‘s files, ultimately learning the town where he was kidnapped out of.
So he leaves his adopted home without telling his adopted parents what he was going to do.
He has enough money to travel on. He goes to the town and searches microfilm copies of the town’s newspaper till he finds news articles about his kidnapping. The articles tell him who his birth parents are, and also, that he has a blood brother only a year or two younger than him.
The story is so beautiful from there. He befriends his blood brother without the brother knowing who he really is. The brother brings him home to meet his birth parents, who think he is just a well behaved, clean cut runaway. They have no idea this is their long lost son.
When a bad blizzard sets in - endangering the adopted boy’s life - his birth parents (still having no idea this is their real son) take him into their home for a temporary stay, with the condition that he call his (adoptive) parents on the phone to let them know where he is. Patty Duke, the birth mother, knows the pain of not knowing where a child of hers was, and she does NOT want another mother to go through that pain, hence the stipulation.
He spends the time heading to Christmas getting to know his real family, and blends quite well into that family. He learns the details of his kidnapping - that his birth mother did nothing wrong. He was kidnapped while playing with his brother inside of their fenced in yard, where he should have been safe. They did everything they could to find him, and his birth mother still loved him and yearned to know where her missing son was, and whether he was alive and safe and happy.
While living with them, he bought presents for the family to open from him on Christmas morning. And he bought a Polaroid camera, getting a family friend to take two pictures of him with his birth family - never disclosing why he had those two pictures taken.
Late Christmas Eve, the adopted boy quietly slipped out of his birth parents home. He left physical presents under the tree for the rest of the family - but for his birth mother, who had temporarily taken him in - a boy she thought she did not know - and offered unconditional love and security to nonetheless — for her, he offered her the greatest Christmas gift of all.
A picture of her ENTIRE family, including her long lost, kidnapped son, along with a beautiful letter, where he told her who he really was. He let her know that he did not blame her for what a professional kidnapper did - that there was no way she could have prevented what happened. He let them know how much love he felt in their home, and his appreciation for how they took him in despite not knowing who he was.
Because of circumstances beyond their control, he told her, he belongs to another family now, (and with this, the camera cuts away to see him returning to his adopted home for Christmas), but she need not worry about her long lost son. He was adopted into a good and loving family. With the camera returning back to his - now crying with joy, birth mother - his parting words to his birth mother were: “I will always love you”.
It was the special,, made for TV movie, which had a special airing on NBC on Christmas night, 1990, if I remember correctly.
but for reasons I so not understand, you NEVER see it on TV during the Christmas season anymore.
It is a perfect Hallmark type Christmas movie, but even the Hallmark channel never shows it.
