
NETFLIX: “Holiday Home Makeover With Mr. Christmas”
If you need a little spirit right this very minute, “Holiday Home Makeover With Mr. Christmas” might just be your ticket to Escapetown, USA.
The “Mr. Christmas” of this new Netflix series is Benjamin Bradley, a Manhattan-based interior designer and Christmas fanatic who typically spends his Novembers and Decembers transforming people’s homes into showcases worthy of this most wonderfully obsessive time of the year. For this four-episode series, which was filmed in a bustling, people-packed 2019, the chipper Bradley and his team of decorating elves drop in on regular folks who have written to him with holiday-worthy challenges. And in the course of three days, Mr. Christmas works some surprisingly doable holiday miracles.
Part decorator and part therapist, Bradley juggles fraught human emotions and big design challenges with grace and snappy good humor. He breaks down even the biggest projects into manageable chunks, and many of the DIY decorating projects — handprint ornaments, a dessert tray made of oven-melted peppermints — are inventive and not at all intimidating. Sort of like Mr. Christmas himself. (Streaming now on Netflix.)