"The town's been really great and they're all working with us."
That's what location manager Nick Thomas said about Olde Towne Slidell back in March, while a Netflix film crew spent about three weeks turning several blocks of the historic district into a town that doesn't exist. If you live in or around Olde Towne, you already know the broad strokes. Garland went up on real storefronts. A pink and white awning appeared where there wasn't one before. For a few weeks, the neighborhood you drive through for coffee or a Tuesday beer had a different name painted on its windows.
What's less obvious, and what actually matters if you care about this stretch of Slidell beyond its brief run as a Netflix backdrop, is what happened after the trucks left. The same year Hollywood decided Olde Towne looked like the real thing without much help, the City of Slidell put its own money into making the district look more like itself, permanently. Two very different production budgets landed on the same historic core in the same year. That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. That's the actual story.
Twenty-Four Days as St. Opal
The movie is called A Christmas Kind of Love, written and directed by Bethany Ashton Wolf, who is from Lake Charles. Thomas said the director felt Slidell already fit the vibe of the story, which is set in a "wholesome, small southern town." The plot follows a widowed baker in rural Louisiana whose daughter uncovers hidden tapes revealing her mother's past as a rising country singer, pushing her to reclaim her voice and help save the town's Christmas show. JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Mark Wystrach, and Madison Wolfe star in the film.
Production ran twenty-four days between the start of March and the start of April, and the St. Tammany Parish portion of the budget came in at four million dollars, according to Roberta Carrow-Jackson, who manages film and television permitting for the parish's tourism agency, Visit the Northshore. During filming, several real businesses got fictional names for their scenes on camera:
| Real Olde Towne Business | Its Role in "St. Opal" |
|---|---|
| Old Town Soda Shop | Sweetie Pie's & Cakes, the bakery at the center of the plot |
| Brass Monkey Draught Emporium | Bob's Magnolia Mart |
| Tacos & Beer | Giddy Gardenia Blooms & Bouquets |
| The Golden Goat | St. Opal Theater |
| Expo Signs | Rusty's Hardware |
| Olde Towne Tavern | The Mint Julep |
If you walked First Street that week, you were technically standing in a fictional town called St. Opal, Louisiana.
The Awning Nobody's Taking Down
Here's the detail worth sitting with. Angela Roques, who co-owns the Old Town Soda Shop, told a reporter during filming that she might keep the new pink and white awning the production had installed on her real building. That's a small thing on paper. It's also the clearest evidence that whatever a Hollywood art department decided Olde Towne should look like wasn't a departure from what was already there. It was a version of it the owner liked enough to consider keeping for good.
Slidell wasn't a fluke pick, either. Carrow-Jackson said seven productions had already been permitted in St. Tammany Parish by late March, including two commercials, a reality show, and four feature films. A crew was filming a separate feature, Social Spider, in the parish that same week. Location scouts have found small-town Louisiana appealing before. Christmas in Louisiana was filmed in Ponchatoula in 2019, and A Christmas Contract was shot in downtown Lafayette in 2018. Olde Towne joining that list this year says something about the district's walkable historic core that has nothing to do with the movie's plot. It photographs like it already belongs on a poster, without a set designer's help.
As for when you'll actually see it on screen, nobody has confirmed yet. Reporting from wrap day in early April noted there was still no official release date, though industry tracking points to a premiere sometime during the 2026 holiday season. Worth putting a reminder on your December calendar.
What the City Is Building With Its Own Money
While the fictional Christmas decorations came down in April, the real ones are going up permanently, on the city's own budget, in time for this weekend. Olde Towne's ninth annual White Linen & Lagniappe runs this Saturday, August 8, from 6 to 9 p.m., and this year's event debuts something that isn't going anywhere after the night ends: Antique Umbrella Alley, a new permanent installation of eighty brightly colored umbrellas suspended above First Street between Erlanger Street and the triangle intersection at Front and Fremaux.
A few other details worth knowing before Saturday:
- Local artist Victoria Brand, an active member of the Slidell Art League, was selected as this year's official poster artist, with a watercolor titled "Vintage Soda Shop." She'll be on hand selling signed copies during the event.
- Admission is free, and the evening includes live music, after-hours shopping, and food and drink from Olde Towne businesses.
- The event is presented by the City of Slidell and supported by the Slidell Commission on the Arts.
An umbrella installation isn't a Christmas movie. It's a smaller, quieter kind of investment, the sort a city funds because it plans on the district still looking good five years from now, not because a shooting schedule requires it for twenty-four days.
Seventeen Years Versus Twenty-Four Days
Put the two numbers next to each other and the size of the movie's contribution gets a lot more honest. Since Olde Towne earned its Louisiana Main Street designation in 2009, the district has logged 142 net new businesses, 523 net new jobs, and just over $28.7 million in combined public and private investment. That's seventeen years of steady, unglamorous work: storefronts filled, jobs added, sidewalks improved, one grant application and one small business loan at a time.
A single Netflix production brought four million dollars into St. Tammany Parish in about a month. That's a real number and a welcome one for the businesses that hosted cameras and crew for those weeks. It's also a fraction of what the district has built for itself since 2009, not the other way around. Netflix didn't create Olde Towne's appeal. It walked into a neighborhood that had already spent nearly two decades building the kind of walkable, well-kept historic core that looks finished on camera without much art direction. The movie is a nice validation. It isn't the reason the validation was available to earn.
What This Means If You're Already Here
None of this requires you to do anything differently on Monday. But if you've lived near Olde Towne long enough to remember when a few of these storefronts sat empty, this is a good year to notice what's changed. A recent feature on Olde Towne's turnaround profiled real, currently operating businesses like KY's Olde Towne Bicycle Shop, Saint August Maison, and Naulty's Shoe Repair, part of the same growth curve that made the district worth $28.7 million to build and four million dollars for a film crew to borrow for a month.
Head down to White Linen & Lagniappe this Saturday. Look up at the umbrellas. Notice whether that pink and white awning on the soda shop is still there. And if you find yourself wondering what a neighborhood on this kind of trajectory means for property here, that's a conversation for another day, and a different kind of post. For now, it's just a good Saturday night in a district that earned its own spotlight before anyone handed it a script.
If you're curious what a market like this looks like from the inside, whether you're watching from a front porch in Olde Towne or thinking further down the road, Gina Constantino has spent more than two decades getting to know these streets. Let's Connect.
