WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM HALLMARK:

There is one aspect of the holiday season that grows ever more fascinating, and that is the explosion over the past decade of cheap TV movies centering on the holiday. Since 2010, Hallmark has made – get this – 170 Christmas movies, which it puts into heavy rotation on the Hallmark channel beginning in mid-October. And now Netflix is following suit. It has released eight this season alone. Not since the days of the Western have there been so many films made with exactly the same plots and exactly the same setting with exactly the same effect.

What’s even more interesting is that they all suggest Christmas is a time of magical salvation from the forces of modern isolation and loneliness. The plots almost always involve a young woman from a big city who finds herself, for some reason, in a picturesque small town. She is either unmarried, or engaged to someone unexciting, or sadly widowed. In the small town she finds a manly man, usually someone who works with his hands, who was either her high school boyfriend and has remained a bachelor because he pines for her or is sadly widowered.

The town is wonderful. The man is wonderful. And yet the woman has a life back in the city. But a few poinsettias, a crackling fire with some stockings hanging nearby and somehow kept from catching fire, a spinet playing carols, and a bearded man who just may be the actual Santa Claus, and you know she’s not going back to her soulless lonely modern existence. She will stay in the small town, protected from the Christmas-lessness of the everyday world, and find peace.

The insatiable public appetite for this story is such that we have to assume it means something more than people liking a good Christmas movie, in part because they’re almost all very bad.

I have some thoughts, but do your own deconstruction in the comments.