Hallmark’s Ideal America Exists in Christmas Movies

Imagine this scene: A 30-something, successful, attractive blonde woman works for a marketing company. She’s been sent from the big city to a small town to promote her company’s latest big product — organic Christmas cookies sold with the tagline, “Just like Grandma’s, Only Better.”

This product could be her big break. She’s done the market research, she’s looked at the numbers, but despite all of the money they’ve thrown at it, no one in her research groups are willing to say that they’re as good as Grandma’s cookies. They’re really good , they all tell her, but there’s just something missing. Fast forward to a week later, on Christmas Eve. She’s making a speech on stage to the residents of North Pole, Colorado, where she’s spent a week living at an Inn and has fallen in love with the widowed man who runs the establishment with his sister.

If this premise sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because you’ve probably seen it on the Hallmark Channel. Every December, Hallmark becomes a 24/7 Christmas channel, showing specifically tailored, two-hour Christmas-themed movies, one after another, starring actors you’ve either never seen before or old actors you haven’t seen in years.

Over the years, these channels have transitioned from airing a couple of bad TV movies and Gilmore Girls reruns into a tightly focused cottage industry of cheesy Christmas cheer. I’ve made a tradition out of watching every year for fun, and Hallmark happily offers a new crop of horrible Christmas movies every single year. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s watching either because it seems to get bigger, more ridiculous, and more promoted every year.

Semi-famous actresses like Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, and Candace Cameron-Bure and Lori Loughlin from Full House have all carved out a late-career niche as the patron saints of bad Christmas movies, promoting the latest crop and often starring in a few.

All Hallmark Christmas movies have a central theme or hook, usually laid out in the title. Christmas is literally magical: The Spirit of Christmas; Haven’t been home in a while: Coming Home for Christmas; Slowing down and finding love: Marry Me at Christmas. My wife and I often make up our own names for the films based on what immediately stands out:

Thank You for Your Service: Every man in the movie has been in the military, the main guy is in between tours in the Middle East, and the protagonist’s husband died in battle.

Pornstar Christmas: A movie where the main actress is distressingly attractive, has a large mouth, and her love interest is so dorky, and the premise is so simple that we kept expecting it actually to turn into porn at several points.

Despite surface-level similarities, I’ve started to realize that all of these movies are not just connected by an obsessive love for Christmas but are actually part of a distinct and consistent genre of film with a clear message — almost like a bizarro-world, conservative, purely commercial version of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95.

At their core, no matter what the theme, or hook, or intended audience, all of these movies tend to promote Christmas as representing a societal ideal — and whether or not Hallmark intends it, they make clear statements about what that ideal is. These commonalities aren’t present in every story, but by watching several of these movies each year, the Hallmark Christmas American dream does reveal itself. Here are a few:

1. Big City vs. Small Town

In Hallmark Christmas movies, there is a clear rejection of the modern, technology-driven urban world — also known as New York and LA. Many stories revolve around some form of Big City commercialism descending on a slow but wise small town. The main character is in a small town on business, tied to his or her cell phone, unable to connect with others when they arrive. The character is then surrounded by sage-like small-town wisdom that turns them away from the shallow glitz of urban living until they eventually decide to leave behind their career and settle down with their somehow perfectly single love interest. It is never the other way around. Woody Allen RomComs, they’re not. These characters only see the virtue of blue-collar simplicity, and the city always represents the opposite of it — and Christmas for some reason.

2. Getting Over Past Trauma to Find Love

The number of single-parent families at the beginning of Hallmark Christmas movies is matched only by the number of never-married single people looking for love. Motherless children abound in these stories, either dragged to a small town by their workaholic fathers or struggling through the Christmas season in a small town where everyone loves their widowed parent. It’s almost always caused by the death of a young mother, always unexplained. And everyone assumes — correctly — that these widowed husbands and wives need to move on and find love. Their emotional difficulties are never deeply examined in the film.

Oh, your wife died last Christmas? Here’s a beautiful young woman who has no baggage, problem solved. Your husband died in Iraq last year? Here’s a single guy who is in between deployments, and he wants to rent your extra room. Nobody is ever asking if it’s too soon, if it’s best for the young child, or even considering whether they should give up everything for someone they bonded with while decorating an orphanage for two days.

3. Saying Merry Christmas

One problem these Characters do not have is saying Merry Christmas. In Hallmark’s universe, there is no war on Christmas. There is no other holiday. There is no other identity.

Characters say Merry Christmas to each other like Hawaiians say Aloha — it means hello, goodbye, thank you, and see you later. Half of the small towns in these movies rely so heavily on Christmas for happiness and the economy that I wonder how these people function at all the rest of the year.

In one movie, a man is trying to save a Christmas store at the local mall from being sold. In the end, the protagonist’s rich father loans him the money to buy the space, saving Christmas. I want to see the sequel, starting on Dec. 26, when the man and his new love interest realize the mountain of debt they’ve incurred to keep the lights on at their novelty store for the next 300 days.

4. A White Christmas

There is a lot of snow in these movies. Granted, it’s supposed to winter, which means snow for many small towns in America. But it’s literally snowing in every scene, day or night, cloudy or sunny. The on-screen snow varies in quality from piles of crunchy real snow to soap bubbles and white silly string. Largely shot in Canada during the summer, these films are not about a California or Hawaiian Christmas. It is firmly cold-weather only, and there is going to be snow and people wearing scarves.

In addition to all of the white snow is, of course, all of the white people. Now it’s really not all that different from most forms of entertainment, admittedly. But on the rare occasion that a Black or Latino character shows up, they can never hope to be more than a friend or bit part. Which is authentic, I think.

This version of Christmas with hot cocoa, borderline worship of decorations, and falling in love with a ghost is very specifically tailored to a certain audience who thinks of those things as either typical or something to be aspired to. It is a world away from my Mexican family Christmas where everyone sits around a TV for 6 hours, eats beans, rice, tamales, ham, pozole, and Hawaiian rolls, and then opens presents on Christmas Eve at midnight. That’s a different movie—definitely a different channel.

5. Christmas as a Legitimate Career or Art

As demonstrated by the man realizing his dream of owning a mall Christmas store, Christmas is revered as either a serious career move or form of art in the Hallmark universe.

One standout story featured a young woman who wanted to be a real artist but never felt that she could make it. But her art was manifest as paintings of Santa Claus. And it wasn’t just what she painted during the holidays — she envisioned her entire career as an artist as a painter of Santa Claus. Of course, people encourage it and are blown away by her talent. If this were real life, the only morally right thing to do would be to have a serious heart-to-heart about whether or not she maybe had another talent. No true friend could ever let her pursue her dream of presenting her work publicly in a gallery.

In another film, a woman’s job was finding the Christmas tree for her city’s version of 30 Rock. Her entire career hinged on getting a huge tree. Think about that.

6. Republican

You know it's true. Politics ostensibly don’t exist in this reality; however, the “family values party” values are as present and persistent as freshly falling fake snow.

• Traditional family values with a slight, vague hint of religion. Check.
• Small Town, no-nonsense wisdom. Check.
• Military. Double Check.
• American Trucks or Classic Cars. Check.
• Middle-class homes even when their jobs are working class. Check.
• No poor or homeless ever, not even in a soup kitchen they’re volunteering at. Check.
• Small business is everything. Check.
• Single people are just married people who haven’t met someone. Check.
• Despite the above, no sex ever. Check.
• Slashing corporate tax rates, defunding Obamacare, kicking out illegals? So far, no.

Maybe this is a stretch, but in my mind, every single person in these films voted Trump and probably told somebody, “I wish he wouldn’t tweet so much.”

Hallmark’s Christmas movies are a gift. They’re over the top, strange when you think about it for too long, stupid, and very, very derivative. But they’re also a world apart from every other form of entertainment.

There’s a reason my mom, who regularly finds the few channels that aren’t in HD and watches them, was drawn to the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas bonanza. The movies are light, inoffensive, easy to digest, easy to forget, and offer a break from reality. And in 2017, when even family films are depressing, sarcastic, nihilistic, 3-hour messes of CGI, maybe there’s something to having a reliable source of earnest entertainment that glosses over dour realities and shows us a world that could never exist.

Or it’s a form of targeted conservative propaganda that is probably, definitely, secretly funded by the Koch Brothers. Merry Christmas, everyone!

She’s supposed to tell the audience that her research guarantees the organic cookies are as good as Grandma’s. Her boss tells her before she goes up that she has to say it — no matter what the truth is — in order to sell the cookies. But she just can’t.

“The secret ingredient in your Grandma’s Christmas cookies… is love and Spirit of Christmas, that’s why they’re the best you’ve ever had. Not our organic cookies,” she tells the audience, to rapturous applause.

An old woman standing by the exit door makes eye contact with her on stage, and winks. Our heroine finally realized what the true meaning of Christmas is. Later, outside the Inn as snow falls, the man she fell in love with kisses her for the first time. She decides to quit her job and move to North Pole, Colorado and she tosses her cell phone in the snow. The End.