Amy Acker studied ballet until knee surgery at 12 years old (to deal with the after effects of a brown recluse spider bite gotten when she was 6 years old), ended her dancing career.
Even though Katherine Barrell plays Amy Acker's older sister, she's actually younger in her real life.
Although The Nutcracker is arguably the most famous ballet work in the world and its composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is still considered the greatest ballet composer of all time, Tchaikovsky's name is nowhere to be found in the film's credits or even rates a mention anywhere in the film. However, in the Closed Captions, the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is twice identified as "Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker'" and the Russian Dance is identified as "Tchaikovsky's Russian Dance." (However the immediately preceding Spanish Dance is identified as "whimsical music" (Throughout, the closed captioning identification of the music is haphazard and quixotic).
Aired as the fourteenth of nineteen original films in The Hallmark Channel's 2016 "Countdown to Christmas" lineup.