In the seaside
Suffolk town of Wellington-on-Sea, the townsfolk are preparing to celebrate
Christmas, with the activities being organised by Bill, the lighthouse keeper. The story follows three groups: Danny Williams, a shy new boy in town who tries to adjust to his parents' divorce, Sam and Charlie Beccles, identical twin sisters who are respectively anxious and mischievous, and Bernadette McNutt, a spirited local rebel who wants to change things up for the holiday. At the school's
Christmas play, Bernadette puts on a more liberal spin, which not many of the parents enjoy. Danny almost misses his cue because he was staring at Sam. Charlie arrives last minute. Danny is upset, but not surprised that his mother has to leave for work. At home, he converses with her through
sticky notes about the play and his crush on Sam. The next morning, the school is closed due to a
weather-related cancellation, but Danny is forced to catch up on his studies by his teacher, Ms. Trapper, after his mother fails to notice the alert. During a ten-minute
recess, Ms. Trapper teaches Danny how to properly build a
snowman and Danny notices that Ms. Trapper is miserable on the way home. On
Christmas Eve, Bernadette stays with her younger sister Evie and their friends in a barn near their houses and prepare their annual
Christmas traditions while their parents attend a
wedding out of town. When the parents leave the reception, they are forced to take the long way home thanks to a
snowstorm, but they go off the road and slide down a slope from off a bridge. They inform their children that they will be home in the morning and have them stay together for the night. Danny is called by his father who informs him he is unable to come due to the blizzard. As Danny sleeps with his mother who comforts him,
Santa Claus arrives at Wellington with his sidekick and talking reindeer
Dasher and, upon learning about the situations in Danny's life, leaves him behind with his
stocking full and a
quad bike in front of his house. After learning of Bernadette and her friends’s current events, Santa leaves them with peculiar gifts. Noting that Sam has been nice while Charlie has been naughty, Santa reluctantly leaves Charlie with the presents. Charlie awakes and is overjoyed to find presents but sadly sees Sam's empty stocking and realises they are meant for her sister. When Charlie moves everything to Sam's stocking, Santa gets a reading that Charlie is in fact nice and returns to Wellington. On
Christmas Day, Charlie wakes up to find her stocking is full, and finds a button saying "officially nice" inside, but decides to keep it away from her family. Sam later discovers that all of Charlie's mischief was to help her, even developing a plan to get her and Danny together. After discovering their gifts, Bernadette leads them in having the Christmas they want, while Evie follows a flock of turkeys during a game of
hide and seek. An overjoyed Danny becomes disheartened when he learns that his mother has to work as Bill's mother is sick. Danny, seeing Ms. Trapper alone, offers to have lunch with her, but she declines and convinces him to see things from his mother's perspective. Meanwhile, the parents struggle to get up from the slope, so they call Ms. Trapper, who enlists Danny's help to convince Farmer Yirrell to get the parents to safety simply by hauling them back to their houses, where they are ultimately greeted by their children and helps Danny make an
igloo for his mother. Danny and his mother reconcile and offer Ms. Trapper a place at their table, but she declines and instead looks through a book of pictures from the early 1980s of Ms. Trapper with Jamie, her late husband who died in the
Falklands War in 1982. The parents notice that Evie is missing and they search for her, getting the town involved in their search. Ms. Trapper enlists Danny to take her to the McNutt house where she takes up the command. As Sam and Charlie run into Danny and join in on his quad bike, the trio enlists Bill to help find Evie. Fortunately, Bill flashes the light on a set of footprints and the group follow them to a row of
beach huts, where they find Evie sheltering with several turkeys. After Bernadette and Evie's parents arrive, Bernadette apologizes to her mother for losing Evie, but she forgives her. Upon learning that Danny thought of using the lighthouse, Bernadette hails him a hero and Danny asks out Sam. On
Boxing Day, Bill goes to the beach to swim in the cold ocean with half the town arriving to enjoy themselves. ==Cast==