Three Days of Christmas

He walked into Netflix with a format and no script.

Pau Freixas told Variety that when he pitched Days of Christmas, all he really had was a vessel. Three episodes. Christmas Day. Four sisters at about 15, 35, and 60. That was the whole brief. The miniseries, Días de Navidad in Spanish and Three Days of Christmas on the English Netflix row, went out worldwide on December 6, 2019. Filmax produced it as a Netflix original. The first Christmas is 1949, in the long shadow of the Civil War. The second is twenty years later. The third is roughly now. The family lives in an isolated house in the mountains and nurses secrets for decades. Twelve actresses play the four sisters across those ages. Victoria Abril, Elena Anaya, Nerea Barros, and Veronica Echegui are the names Variety led with. Angela Molina, Charo Lopez, latestnetflix.com contends, and Veronica Forque fill the older generation. , ,

Freixas had already built a resume that made the pitch land. Welcome to the Family. I Know Who You Are. Red Band Society, which won best series at the 3rd International Emmy Kids Awards and got a U.S. remake from Steven Spielberg's Amblin and ABC Studios. He was heading TV series development at Filmax and told Variety he was developing three more projects. Lucas Vidal, who scored Isabel Coixet's Endless Night, wrote the music. Gris Jordana shot it. Freixas executive produced and wrote. The English Wikipedia page also lists Arca Audiovisual alongside Filmax and Netflix, with episode lengths between 53 and 66 minutes. Three episodes, one night, no weekly drip. ,

Three tones on purpose, which is the gossip.

Freixas said the initial idea was three episodes in three completely different tones. "It's completely outlandish," he told Variety. The first is a children's tale. The second matches the age of the protagonists when the conflict erupts. The third is at times darkly humorous, framed by characters further along in life. Early screenings, he said, stirred emotions because the show is about family, the passing of time, and bonds. The tones were supposed to feel like a journey, not a holiday card. He also said everyone has a family and it is more or less the origin of all our traumas. That is the Freixas beat. He keeps returning to households even when the industry talk is heists and prestige crime.

The Netflix Espana trailer, posted November 26, 2019, sells the same hook in 88 seconds. Four sisters. Adolescence, adulthood, old age. Secrets and fights that do not look the same once time has moved. La Vanguardia ran the clip the same day and listed Molina, Lopez, Abril, Forque, Barros, Anaya, Echegui, and Anna Moliner. Wikipedia adds Alicia Borrachero, Antonio Dechent, Susi Sanchez, and Francesc Garrido in the wider company. Filmax's own page names Carlos Fernandez and Laura Fernandez as Filmax executive producers, Teresa Gefaell as delegate producer, and Irene Roque as casting director. The house, the tree, the four women aging in place. That is the image that traveled. , , ,

Spanish TV was in a boom Freixas was happy to name. Alex Pina's Money Heist and Leticia Dolera's Perfect Life had people talking about a golden age. Freixas agreed. Platforms had discovered that Spanish-language series could sell beyond Latin America, and that the cost-to-quality ratio was good. He called it a magical moment with a very high bar. Three Days of Christmas is the quieter title from that wave. No city-wide heist. A mountain house and a calendar trick. Veronica Forque died in 2021, which retroactively made her episodes feel like a last look at a performer Spanish audiences already knew. That is not a production rumor. It is what happened after the drop. The series itself stays what Freixas sold. One format, three Christmases, twelve faces for four sisters, and a creator who admitted he walked in with the vessel before he had the secrets.