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LOCALLY FILMED H O L I D A Y M O V I E S

all-in on Christmas programming. It was, to put it mildly, a success. Eighty million viewers is a mind-blowing number. Hallmark also has the “Movies and Mysteries” channel, whose fare is best described as wall-to-wall cozy mysteries, where somebody always gets murdered, but nobody ever gets hurt. The heroines sip tea, knit, and get the dastardly coward who killed the beloved neighbor or stole the valuable family heirloom. It’s Scooby-Doo for serious folks — but not too serious! And if we love Hallmark movies, Hallmark movies love us right back. Quite a few of them are filmed in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These are lots of local jobs, lots of big business. The movies are made in about two weeks, and Hallmark alone pumps out a few dozen a year. It takes a lot of solid technical talent to make movies at that pace with that level of quality. These are absolute pros on set. And their stars have probably been behind you in the Rouses checkout line, and you didn’t even notice. They film here for good reason — we’ve got it all! If Louisiana is good enough for Chris Pratt or Anna Kendrick, it’s good enough for that sort of famous actress who was in that TV show a few years ago I think. A day’s drive down I-10 (with a detour on 55) and you’ll basically be in half the holidays movies you’ve seen where Becky from the big city has to make peace with her estranged brother just in time to light the tree in the town square. To name only a few: Earlier this year, shooting started on Family Christmas , which is the perfect distillation of every Hallmark movie title. It is being filmed in Sorrento, in Ascension Parish, and is easily the biggest thing to happen in Sorrento since John “Hot Rod” Williams (a Sorrento native) played for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA in the 1980s and 90s. In 2019, the Lifetime Original Movie A Christmas Wish was filmed in Ponchatoula, and saw Faith, the main character, make a Christmas wish to experience true love for the first time. When she meets Andrew the next day, it seems Christmas has delivered. But is her true love Andrew? Or is it her best friend Wyatt, who was there all along? Meanwhile, Lifetime also filmed Christmas in Louisiana in New Iberia. In it, a big city lawyer goes back to her hometown to celebrate an annual Christmas festival, and

directly instrumental that book was on culture 179 years ago, and your family Christmas gathering today. That’s a pretty good run for any book’s sway. The Christmas invented by Dickens feels right, somehow. A warm, comforting way to celebrate something in a cold, unforgiving world, and a vital message that says, “You can change and this can be your life.” Yes, when you read the book or watch the zillion different movies of it, you are Scrooge . On some level, Hallmark movies are the apotheosis of the Dickens holiday ideal, but on a deeper level, they are shaping our own perceptions of the holiday season, and what it should be. (Hallmark as a brand has been no slouch, either. You may not believe this, but Hallmark invented modern wrapping paper!) The movies provide an escape from literally every institutional, economic, and political problem in the world. It always snows on cue, the people in your everyday life are pulling for you, working for your happy ending. Houses still have white picket fences! We want to live in that world, and it feels so possible, it’s right there , just out of reach. The main character has a problem — but not too awful a problem. Home is more than a house, but rather, is a community. (I mean how many people know the name of their mail carrier in real life?) She has an interesting job. Her hometown never looks the way we’ve allowed our towns to look — endless stretches of stoplights, gas stations, fast food, and national chain stores. She’ll never get to her car and find the driver side window has been smashed in and the glovebox rifled through, and wonder how she is going to pay the rent and repair the window. If she is single, she’ll find an effort less love (though not too effortless — there must be tension). (But not too much tension!) The world we have created looks a lot more like the old Lifetime movies than the new. If for no other reason, it is good to have a touchstone. Something to work toward. Hallmark has been in the television business since the 1950s. In 2001, the company bought a religious channel, Odyssey, and over the next decade, its schedule started looking a lot less like generic lifestyle and family programming and a lot more like a Thomas Kincade painting. By the mid-2010s, Hallmark went

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