“We’re playing Clinton for Clinton,” director David Lipper said. No stand-in. No substitution. The small Mississippi town where this Christmas romance was filmed is also the small town where the story takes place. That is rarer than it should be.
The 12 Dates of Christmas is directed by Lipper, co-written with Seth Howard, and produced by Latigo Films, BuzzFeed Studios, Applewood Studios, CaliWood Pictures and Fortitude International.
Lucy Hale plays Christina Walker – a successful shop owner who has poured everything into her career while her love life waited. Her best friend Molly convinces her to go on twelve dates in the twelve weeks before Christmas. Then Peter (Ian Harding) shows up, and the plan gets complicated.
Hale and Harding last shared a screen on Pretty Little Liars, where their characters’ relationship was a central thread of the show. Hale has joked that they now finally play people of the same age. The cast also includes Carter Jenkins, Penelope Ann Miller, Greer Grammer, Paul Ben-Victor and Kahyun Kim.
Principal photography took place in December 2025 in Clinton, Mississippi – a small city of around 25,000 people in Hinds County, about fifteen minutes west of Jackson. The production was centred entirely around Clinton’s Olde Towne District – brick streets, historic storefronts, the kind of downtown that feels like it was designed for a Christmas movie but happens to be real.
The entire film was shot in eleven days. “The fact that all the locations were so close together helped us save time with moving our cast, crew, and gear around,” producer Kipp Tribble said. Everything within walking distance. One town. One district. One story.
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The restaurant 303 Jefferson in the Olde Towne District served as one of the date locations.
The Bank by Pizza Shack at 200 West Leake Street provided another date setting. A pizzeria in a former bank building.
On December 9, one of Christina’s dates was filmed at Coach’s Creamery at 202 West Leake Street – Clinton’s one-stop ice cream shop serving a wide variety of ice cream treats, homemade hot chocolate and dirty sodas. The shop posted on social media that filming would be taking place downtown and invited locals to grab a front-row seat.
The production also reportedly travelled to Jackson – one of the two county seats of Hinds County and the state capital – for additional scenes. The specific Jackson locations have not been confirmed.
This is David Lipper’s fourth film shot in Clinton and his seventh in Mississippi since 2022. His previous Clinton production, The Neglected, starring Josh Duhamel, featured murders and a car chase with screeching tyres through the Olde Towne streets. For The 12 Dates of Christmas, he brought a softer tone. “When I have a film that’s about small-town America, I think of Clinton,” he said.
The 12 Dates of Christmas is streaming on Hulu.
The Clinton Courier // IMDb // Social Media posts
© Fortitude International, Latigo Films, Applewood Studios, Buzzfeed Studios
© Angel, 2521 Entertainment,
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