Have Yourself a Hallmark Little Christmas
by David Roth
It is my bad luck or just my nature that every stupid personal obsession I have cultivated—some of them part of my livelihood, most just symptomatic of whatever my broader problem is—involves maintaining sprawling constellations of names and associations in my head, tinkering around with them in my idle moments, and fighting not to reveal the perverse dimensions of these Escherian mind palaces in conversation. It is a lot to walk around with in the first place, and this is the season in which it is tested most strenuously.
Had things broken differently for me, all that space and attention might have been put to more productive use. Where there could have been scores of literary allusions, deftly applied, or basically any remnant of the political or literary theory I read in college, there are now instead just countless names, compulsively arranged and re-arranged: ballplayers, filmmakers, musicians and their side projects, and finally, the one obsession I try hardest not to be too weird about, the burden I carry discreetly around to various holiday parties—the actors and films and honking tinsel-blasted Christmas movie tropes that fill out the Hallmark Cinematic Universe. This is my annual struggle: to avoid revealing myself as too much of A Hallmark Guy to someone I don’t really know like that, at least not before I determine how far down this particular chimney they are willing to follow.
Talking about films that you’ve seen and cared about with other people who care about them, too, is interesting and useful. These conversations don’t have to be about “great films,” really—it’s kind of exhausting if they are—it’s just a way of connecting easily with interesting people. Knowing a great deal about the films and performers of the Hallmark universe isn’t really like that. “A great deal” also being relative in this context, because there are so many Hallmark movies. Since October 17, Hallmark has released a new film each Saturday and Sunday; that’s 24 films in all, fewer than in years past—including ones that aired on their streaming service, Hallmark released 32 last year—but an astonishing and faintly concerning number all the same.
Not all of them are Christmas films, to be clear. One of last week’s premieres, Oy To The World, is sort of a Hanukkah movie and mostly a Christmas movie, admirably open-minded about interfaith relationships, and unfortunately also pretty bad; Round And Round, which starred the nonbinary improv comic Vic Michaelis and is one of the best Hallmark movies I’ve seen, was a Hanukkah entry last year. But they all exist within the same cozy-cloying Marshmallow World, and tend to unfold along the same beats—city people coming home to the suburbs or the country for the holidays and realizing what really matters, viz., gingerbread contests and snowman invitationals and hot cocoa and pajamas and the occasional straightfaced visit from Santa, and a striking number of gazebos. Do you want to know more about this? Are you sure?
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