I Love Stupid Christmas Chick Flicks 

I ’m not particularly festive. Although we usually had a tasteful nativity scene near the front entrance (because some kind of heavy guilt mysteriously emerges in Italians who lack it), not once in my childhood did we ever have a real Christmas tree, twinkling lights, charming snow globes, strung garlands, or a quaint ceramic holiday village. We never made gingerbread cookies, and I’ve never touched a candy cane because mint disgusts me. Now, I’m living in a little-ish apartment just outside of the capital, and I would love to enliven the rooms with tinsel and ornate wreaths, but I have neither the spare funds nor unused space for elaborate decorations. However, there is one silly holiday activity that I have been enjoying the entire month. It causes me great embarrassment to admit that I love those unpretentious, wholesome Hallmark-style movies made specifically for conservative-ish housewives.

You know exactly the movies I’m talking about. There’s a formula: The leading man and woman come from different backgrounds but meet due to some unusual circumstance, then there’s some mild interpersonal conflict (due to either a miscommunication or a concern that their lifestyles are too different to reconcile), then one person stays in town for a specific event despite wanting to leave, then they realize they love each other. A single chaste kiss occurs within the last five minutes. There are no dark surprises, aside from the infrequent instances where a close family member or friend dies. Sometimes, there are vague references to a family member who passed a long time ago, and everyone attempts to keep that person’s weirdly specific traditions alive. (“We have to drink four ounces of eggnog at 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve because grandma said Santa won’t come otherwise,” or something like that.) Of course, there’s always the local, racially ambiguous best friend who has no particular life background nor any defining personality traits aside from being supportive, reassuring, and full of corny puns. For no good reason at all, something low-stakes is treated as sacred and integral to everyone’s identity. (“Everyone who grew up in Maple Hollow loves the annual Christmas cookie competition, and it doesn’t feel like Christmas without it, but we can’t do it this year because of the terrible fire. . . unless someone can come up with a last-minute venue!”) The “villains” in this movie genre, to the extent they even exist in the plot, are just normal guys who work respectable jobs and haven’t yet embraced the holiday cheer. (“I absolutely cannot attend the Holly Jolly Festival because my boss is making me prepare for our case that goes to the Supreme Court in January,” says the guy who is supposedly an unreasonable jerk yet ends up saving the Holly Jolly Festival.) If you have seen just one of these movies, you have seen them all.

Brainless and low-budget movies they may be, but I nonetheless keep them as background noise to amplify the holiday spirit, like an ornament for my television. When I cook, I like half-listening to the cookie-cutter story of a Nice Local Girl traveling abroad for the first time, where she inadvertently charms the Handsome Duke of the made-up country Elviria when he’s disguised as a normal civilian to escape royal life temporarily — and it just so happens that he must get engaged before Christmas due to some obscure law. As I’m cleaning around the apartment, I love listening to a story about a Big City Architect Girl who visits home for the holidays and suddenly has to judge the Important Annual Gingerbread Competition, then she gets engaged to Attractive Small Town Carpenter Guy who built a structurally sound and visually captivating gingerbread house; he had previously insisted that he never bakes, but he entered the contest to win the prize money — which just happens to be the exact amount needed to save his family’s Christmas tree farm.

I’ve watched so many of these Kris Kringle chick flicks that I am a certified connoisseur of stories about a small town with exactly one bakery, and I could pursue a secondary career as a screenwriter. I think it would be cute if the Dedicated Event Planner Lady organizes a small town’s first Winter Festival, and a sprig of mistletoe seems to appear everywhere she stands, including above the Endearing Local Handyman who keeps fixing things near her. I want an Impressive Lawyer Woman, who is up for a promotion at a Fancy Law Firm (in footage of Toronto masquerading as New York), to return home after inheriting her family’s failing reindeer farm, then enter a legal battle over zoning rights with the town’s Really Hot Veterinarian who is trying to expand his practice; she decides to not ruthlessly sue him once she sees he’s been lovingly hand-feeding her animals organic herbs out of the goodness of his heart, and then they begin a successful animal sanctuary together.

You can bash these types of movies (along with my own ideas) as unsophisticated, unserious, and boring. Indeed, they offer no intellectual benefits. But I love Hallmark-type movies because of — not despite — their similarities. It is precisely the predictability that provides comfort. Clicking on the Hallmark channel is entering the risk-free guarantee to watch a woman meet her one true love, then live happily ever after. Honestly, Hallmark offers the adult version of Disney princess movies, but minus the singing. And during the inordinately stressful holiday season, when stay-at-home moms are burdened with the additional obligations to cultivate the seasonal merriment, Hallmark-esque romcoms provide the perfect entertainment that offers amusement without distraction. If you walk away from the television to fix the beds for soon-to-arrive visiting family members, you can return to the screen 15 minutes later and immediately diagnose exactly what’s happening. These movies are better characterized as “holiday ambient echoes” than “movies,” since they are best consumed by vaguely overhearing them as opposed to sitting down and watching. Neither emotional investment nor mental attention is required.

Despite following unoriginal plots and featuring uninspired characters, Hallmark movies are refreshing in comparison to everything else churned out in Hollywood. Claiming these chick flicks are “anti-woke” is too strong because politics is never overtly discussed, but they are pleasantly un–woke. There are no non-binary siblings who work at drag bars, no gay male best friends who offer only cringe-worthy snazzy remarks, no monologues about “oppression,” no scandalous sex scenes, and no disabled actor thrown in just for the sake of making an appearance. Moreover, even though the romance develops at a rather fast pace and nobody in the real world ever faces the sudden obligation to rescue a Christmas tree farm, the Hallmark channel retains some realism and plausibility. I’ve grown confused watching a Netflix series wherein every couple is interracial; these casting decisions are not morally offensive, just so statistically ignorant that it is almost disorienting to perceive a social order different from what is known. If we’re being honest, Hallmark is one of the few entertainment channels where Christian and conservative values shine, thus rendering them familiar to people like me: The movies often stress the importance of family, the good of marriage, the significance of maintaining (even extremely arbitrary) traditions, and the social support that emerges from a close-knit community. You can demand more substance in a movie, but for a simple gal like me, that’s enough.

To put it plainly, Hallmark movies are all the same, yet entirely different from all the other garbage. People who are desperate to appear as high-brow cultural critics with refined taste will sneer that the long list of cliches in these unoriginal movies is cringe-inducing, but these platitudinous romances provide a mild comfort that enhances the festive joy. I am happy to admit, despite full awareness of the snide remarks my cousins (all male on both sides) will make at the dinner table, that I find holiday romcoms weirdly reassuring and thus enjoyable. I don’t mind when every conflict is solved by hot cocoa and premarital eye contact, while it makes me smile to see true love emerge between commercial breaks. Should this qualify me as “uneducated” or “uncultured,” then so be it. I’ll embrace my ordinariness, and I will forget these inoffensive insults tonight when I start playing the story about an Accomplished Corporate Girl returns to Snowberry Forest after ten years to optimize the annual Candy Cane Celebration, where she runs into her (now really attractive) high-school boyfriend — but he’s the extremely popular mayor whose entire campaign was centered on banning Excel spreadsheets.