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HALLMARK THE HERALD ANGELS SING By David W. Brown Suppose you want to watch a movie about a high-powered businesswoman / a plucky interior designer / a seamstress with big dreams and an Etsy account / an up-and-coming barista / an actress on the cusp of stardom who finds out her dad is sick / learns the family farm is in trouble / is asked to be in her sister’s wedding / is contacted by an attorney about some inherited land two weeks before Christmas / Thanksgiving / “the holiday.” She is reticent to return to her hometown in the picturesque mountains / windswept prairielands / hilly farm country so close to the holidays, but she does, and when she gets there she meets Ryan, the town handyman who knows everyone / Jake, the farmhand with an old but reliable pickup truck / Todd, a young attorney with a new legal practice who just loves this ol’ town / Will, also traveling from out of town who is handsome and rakish, a little sweet and definitely manly.

O ur heroine (has had a bad experience with love / doesn’t care much for “the holidays” / has an important meeting back in New York and doesn’t have time for this), and just wants to take care of things and get back to the city. Suddenly, (a snowstorm / an illness that takes a turn for the worst / complicated legal paperwork / a canceled flight) keeps her delayed, and (no cell reception / no internet / a guilt trip from her sassy aunt / a forgotten Macbook charger and of course there are no Apple Stores in this one-horse town) stops her from working. She keeps encountering her handsome admirer, and (the town postman who looks a little like Santa / her cheeky old aunt / her precocious niece / Old Frank who owns the hardware store) thinks the two look great together. Will she (fall in love / stick around for the holiday and have dinner with her handsome new beau’s big family she hardly knows / move back to her hometown now that she knows the true meaning of love and the holidays / all of the above)? You’ll just have to watch and find out! If you want to watch that movie, then have I got a channel for you.

with a heart of gold). Who is watching those movies? You are, even if you don’t want to admit it —and you aren’t alone. Eighty million people watch Hallmark holiday movies every year. (There are only 300 million people in the United States.) They’re so popular that Candace Cameron Bure, who is like the Orson Welles of Hallmark movies, quit Hallmark to start her own holiday movie channel. The important thing to acknowledge about Hallmark movies is that they are pleasures not because they are bad, but because they are so good. All else proceeds from there. They are well-cast and well-acted. The stakes for the characters are low, which is comforting to all of us. The outcome is always positive. More comfort yet. We are, all of us, in some way panicked and lonely and uncertain, subject to relentlessly depressingly news in a world spiraling out of control, and any kind of comfort we can get is a valid comfort. Strangely, I have never spoken to somebody about Hallmark movies who didn’t describe them as a “guilty pleasure,” but what a mistake that is! Given the choice between, well, everything going on every where, it seems, and a movie where a plucky travel agent falls in love with the good natured ranch hand, well I know which one I’d choose. Once Hallmark figured out the formula, everyone decided to get in on the action.

Lifetime, which was once known for more intense fare, featuring couples and even entire families no one would describe as wholesome (they had way more revenge killings than Hallmark movies, anyway), is now Hallmark Lite. Amazon joined the fray, too (you can always tell which movie is a lighthearted, romantic holiday flick because the people look happy). Netflix? The final few subscribers to it report to me that Hallmark type movies are standard fare when the holiday season sets in. So ubiquitous is the Hallmark movie that it has transcended its channel of origin and the company that produces them. (I’m just going to call them all “Hallmark movies” here — you know exactly what I am talking about.) Hallmark movies deliver Christmas. You don’t even have to be Christian to buy into the ideal. White snow piled shoulder high, blanketing every inch of real estate. Carols and cookies and guileless love and good intentions. The shows sustain something inside us all that is woefully malnourished. And they aren’t the first bit of media to do so. The modern Christmas that we celebrate is in large measure an invention of Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol is more than a great story about Muppets — so influential was the book that it popularized everything from the phrase “Merry Christmas” to the big family meal we have to celebrate the holiday. It is almost impossible to overstate how

Everyone loves a good Hallmark movie, where there is no COVID, no inflation, no social media anxiety, and no politics (aside from old Mr. Jenkins, the town mayor

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