Christmas Calories and Hallmark Movies

We’re closing in on Christmas, and we all know what that means: Hallmark Christmas Movies.

Yes, break out the sappy, predictable, saccharine-sweet films where a small town needs to be saved, someone from a royal family finds love, lantern-jawed men in wooly sweaters fall in love with type-A women who now embrace baking cookies, and children who have lost a parent in death joyfully find a new parental figure while stringing Christmas lights during a gentle snowfall in a bucolic mountain town.

While not a huge fan myself, I have dear friends—men included—who are. To better relate to them, I watched a lot of Hallmark Christmas trailers. After 45 minutes of watching, my retinas were unable to process any more red ribbons, green sweaters, string lights and fake snow on studio backlots. The set design and decorating are predictable and predictably overdone. It’s like Christmas in Whoville, Bedford Falls, the town of the “Home Alone” kid and Hogwarts all rolled into one.

And yet, viewership keeps climbing. In 2023, “A Merry Scottish Christmas” beat every cable news program that week with 1.9 million viewers. [i] Commenting on this trend, The New York Times Magazine wrote, “Taking into consideration all ad-supported cable, “A Merry Scottish Christmas” was the most-watched movie of 2023. The core viewers included women in key advertiser-prized categories, and the demographic details go broader than what many perceive to be Hallmark’s viewership: crotchety and cane-shaking “N.C.I.S.” fans. [ii]

Some History

In the 1950s—the golden age of television—the new medium was still figuring out how to make money. Before executives learned they could sell 30-second spots to advertisers, companies would actually sponsor an entire show. One of the most famous was the “Texaco Star Theatre” starring Milton Berle. Texaco Star, the gasoline company, sponsored the show from 1948-53. Buick later took over, changing the name to “The Buick-Berle Show.” Eventually, this type of corporate sponsorship disappeared.

In 2001, Hallmark Channel revived the practice, now producing its own shows and marketing (mostly) its own products. This freed them up to create whatever they wanted to support their brand and products. And what are those products? Hallmark cards. These are pithy, emotional, and safe products for mass consumption. If the Hallmark Channel produced difficult, nuanced messages that tackle issues and raise difficult questions, they might find themselves distancing their core audience. We buy Hallmark cards for those emotional moments of our lives—birthdays, funerals, weddings, graduations. We don’t want to wrestle with racism, murder, evil, bigotry, abuse, or misogyny in those moments. We want the sweetness, the quick rush of the feel-goods, then we move on. There’s nothing wrong with occasional doses of this. But will a steady diet numb us to the realities of life? How do we embrace both the simple and the complex? Real life—as all of us know—is as far removed from one of these sweet stories as a real snowstorm is from fake snow on a studio backlot.

Perhaps Hallmark TV movies are the greeting card equivalent of this medium, on the polar opposite side of Taxi Driver, Silence, Babette’s’ Feast, The Seventh Seal and the rest of that long, illustrious list of movies that get us thinking deeply about issues through the use of metaphor and nuance. Hallmark cards and movies don’t truck in depth, metaphor, or nuance. They are straight-forward, on the nose, clear, clean (mostly), predictable, and for many viewers, oh-so comforting and calming.

Can’t we all get along?

I think there’s room for films like this. While some might not be able to stomach this formula, others can’t stomach the hard-hitting-make-you-think films, either; they find them exhausting. They want a safe, predictable story so they can get on with their busy lives. Maybe it’s like the person who goes to a restaurant with an extensive menu of exotic dishes, yet he ends up getting a cheeseburger and fries. Why? Because he’s just not in the mood to try something new or invest in flavor profiles when what he loves and knows is right there, waiting to be devoured.

Kati Morton, a licensed marriage and family therapist, writes that “the human brain loves patterns and predictability when we are stressed out." [iii] Let’s be honest: The holiday season can be stressful.

When entering the Hallmark world during the holidays, viewers can practically smell the warm cookies and the mulled wine. You can feel the nip in the air and smell the pine needles as you bring the perfect tree into the perfect house. People smile—too much?—and the first-world problems they encounter seem a world away from your own. At the same time, if your Letterboxd app is full of yet-to-be-seen serial killer films and your “continue watching” column on Netflix is stuffed full of crime dramas, “Stranger Things,” and reruns, perhaps some predictable Hallmark fare isn’t such a bad idea.

Hallmark, whose company values include creating “a more emotionally connected world,” knows what it’s doing. “Nine out of 10 Hallmark TV movies (in the past few years) are classed as being a romance on IMDb.” The great majority of their films are released in November and December, and most are set in Winter/Christmas. [iv]

Have Hallmark Movies become their own genre? Some would say so with even Netflix churning out films with plots similar to these actual Hallmark Christmas plots:

• A journalist who embarks on a cross-country train ride at Christmas having no idea this journey will take him into the rugged terrain of his own heart.
• Rebecca, a businesswoman who has let go of her joy of Christmas, is trying to secure her next big deal and promotion to executive vice president before the end of the year. When she’s sent on assignment to a remote town, she meets the handsome widower John, owner of the Holly & Ivy Inn, which is named after his two daughters. It’s not long before Rebecca’s all-business exterior begins to thaw and she finds her Christmas spirit returning just in time.
• It was supposed to be the perfect engagement. What could be more romantic than a Christmas proposal in a bucolic Vermont inn? Ian has it planned perfectly, or so he thinks. Miranda, an interior designer, returns to where she met Ian, a dashing former attorney who now runs the little hotel in the quaint town of Carlton Heath. After doing some digging to learn about her family roots, Miranda had traced her lineage to Carlton Heath. Though it’s Christmas, Miranda had always done her best to distance herself from the holiday; her mom, an actress, had died while performing a holiday play. Ian has carefully planned every aspect of Miranda’s visit so he could make the most romantic proposal. Too bad the best-laid plans often go awry – even during Christmas.

Or as blogger Claire J. Harris writes in her summation of every Hallmark Christmas movie, the plot centers around the following items:
She runs a small business … that is threatened by an evil corporation. She is with the wrong guy …and the right guy was there all along. She has a dead parent …or a meddling live one. Christmas is a hard time of year. [v]

Christmas Calories

I recently watched “Sweet Home Alabama” with my wife. It’s not a Hallmark Movie, but it could be. The busy executive from New York goes home to Pigeon Creek, Alabama to hillbilly parents and the life she left behind. In the process, she discovers that the love she sought was there all the time and her “important” life in NYC just wasn’t all that important. Personally, I don’t need to do that again for many, many, months. But I do get the appeal. It’s sweet. It’s safe. It’s comfort food. It’s a cheeseburger and fries.

And yet Christians do need to be careful with their daily intake of media calories during the holidays. Just like with our actual diet, empty media calories seem to proliferate in the runup to Christmas. Rarely do we experience the actual reason for Christmas in the songs, commercials, jingles and sitcoms during this season. It’s all about Santa, gifts, the “spirit of the holidays” (whatever that means) and the true meaning of Christmas, which varies depending on which show you’re watching.

In the very popular Elf movie, for example, we learn that if we just have enough Christmas spirit and sing carols with gusto, we can help Santa get his sleigh back in the air so he can finish his rounds. While that may sound ridiculous, is it any worse than many of the plots we see in these holiday movies?

As Christians, we live and move and have our being here on earth. Yet we long for Christ’s return, the establishment of the new earth and the unspeakable joy of being in God’s presence in our resurrected bodies. We must be on guard against false substitutes, replacing the reality of the not yet with the made-up smarminess of a director churning out yet another unrealistic fantasy. Yes, they are clean, reasonably safe movies. But are they even real? Do they draw us closer to the Christ of Christmas, or are they just part of the Christmas noise?

I guess we all have to decide if we want a steady diet of burgers and fries, or if we’re ready to expand our palettes. Christmas is a great time to indulge in a few sweets, while also enjoying hearty meals that give us strength for the new year to come. Go ahead and indulge in the occasional bucolic town with the lantern-jawed man and the woman trying to find love. But don’t neglect the heartier fare that engages the mind and the soul. Don’t forget that Christ was born in a shed with smelly animals, poor parents and gawking shepherds under a military occupation. I’m sure there wasn’t a shred of potpourri to be found.

Footnotes:

i. Forbes Business. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/11/22/tis-the-season-a-hallmark-christmas-movie-outrated-everything-on-cable-news-last-week/?sh=16b28744504b

ii. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/hallmark-channel-loveuary.html

iii. Taken from “Are U Ok? A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health” as quoted in “Why We Love Bad Christmas Movies.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-love-bad-christmas-movies_l_5fc5517dc5b66bb88c697abe

iv. https://stephenfollows.com/p/how-many-hallmark-christmas-movies-are-there

v. https://www.clairejharris.com/2018/12/21/%EF%BB%BFthe-plot-of-every-single-hallmark-christmas-movie/