By Lori Rackl, Tribune News Service
With more than its fair quota of quaint towns, pretty parks and sandy beaches laced along 300 miles of shoreline, Wisconsin’s Door County has long been a popular Midwest summer getaway. But this slender peninsula sandwiched between Lake Michigan and Green Bay has plenty of appeal in winter, too. And a new holiday movie aims to show it.
“A Wisconsin Christmas Pie” stars Katie Leclerc (“Switched at Birth”) as a Chicago pastry chef who returns home to Door County, where she has to deal with her family’s struggling orchard and a rekindled crush on a high-school flame. It’s your typical feel-good, hygge-filled holiday flick — as well as a love letter to a vacation destination that often gets overlooked when the temperature drops.
Movie scenes unfold among the snow-covered branches of Peninsula State Park and rows of dormant cherry trees at Lautenbach’s Orchard Country, which doubles as the beleaguered family business in the film. Characters stroll between stalls selling cherry jam, alpaca sweaters and dried lavender at Christkindlmarkt, an annual event in the northern county hamlet of Sister Bay. A candy-apple red Door County trolley cruises through fat snowflakes along the serene coast.
“People who are here in the winter always say it looks like a Christmas movie, and now it is,” said Jon Jarosh, head of communications for Destination Door County.
If viewers are going to make a game out of it and drink every time the film makes a Wisconsin reference, they’d better have a brandy old-fashioned glass the size of a paint bucket. The movie is stuffed with Badger State shout-outs, from New Glarus beer and Renard’s cherry cheddar cheese to an appearance by former Green Bay Packers running back Ahman Green.
Door County’s tourism office helped bankroll the production, which recently debuted on the Great American Family network and various streaming services.
“It puts the focus on a different time of year that’s not May through October — our high season,” said Jarosh, who dressed in a cherry pie costume for his cameo. (“I hope I don’t get typecast,” he laughed.)
Almost half of the annual visitors to Door County, often dubbed the Cape Cod of the Midwest, come in June, July and August. December, January and February account for only 8% of the region’s overnight stays, according to the tourism bureau.
Winter might mean some businesses pare back hours, but the county doesn’t hibernate through the frostier months. Parks turn into cold-weather playgrounds for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, sledding and snowmobiling. Anglers head onto carpets of ice to catch whitefish, walleye and northern pike. (Fishing charter guides can hook up novices with the necessary bait, gear and shanties.)
The Ridges Sanctuary offers hiking and luminaria-lit boardwalks at its 1,700-acre nature preserve in Baileys Harbor, a lighthouse-studded town on the Lake Michigan side of the peninsula. Door County Trolley runs holiday pub crawls and winter wine tours, and Mayberry’s Carriages has horse-drawn sleigh rides at Lautenbach’s Orchard, one of the filming locations.
The county’s largest city, Sturgeon Bay, is home to about 10,000 people — and the Door County Maritime Museum, a good spot to warm up indoors. The tourist attraction draws about 100,000 visitors a year, many of whom come to learn about the plethora of shipwrecks filling the surrounding waters. The county’s name stems from the French phrase for death’s door. It’s a reference to the treacherous passage between the north end of the peninsula and Washington Island, the largest of Door County’s 34 isles and the only one with a year-round community.
The maritime museum sits along Sturgeon Bay’s working waterfront, the backdrop for one of the film’s flirty scenes between Emma the pastry chef and fisherman Mitch Henriksen. The latter character’s name is a nod to the county’s real-life whitefish suppliers, Henriksen Fisheries. The longtime business is selling its whitefish chowder along with some movie merch at this year’s Christkindlmarkt.
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Lake Michigan whitefish is the star ingredient of the beloved Door County fish boil. The outdoor event involves tossing kerosene on a fire, causing a giant kettle of fish, potatoes and onions to boil over. The blaze gets rid of the fish oil that’s floated to the top of the cauldron. This culinary spectacle with Scandinavian roots is a hot ticket with tourists in the summer, but some places keep the tradition going all year.
The White Gull Inn in Fish Creek puts on winter fish boils Fridays and Sundays. “A Wisconsin Christmas Pie” cast and crew were supposed to shoot their requisite fish boil scene at this historic inn and restaurant, but a lightning storm quashed those plans. It ended up being filmed at Waterfront Mary’s Bar and Grill in Sturgeon Bay, where visitors can catch a fish boil on Saturdays in winter.
Both fish boil joints are among the 16 stops that make up the new Door County Christmas movie trail. At each location, people get points for checking in with their mobile phone. These points can be redeemed for movie-themed prizes at the Door County welcome center in Sturgeon Bay.
“We have coffee mugs to give away and a special blend from Door County Coffee for people to enjoy,” Jarosh said, “hopefully while they’re watching the film.”
Lori Rackl is a freelance writer.
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