wsj.com This Season’s Guilty Pleasure: Binge-Watching Hallmark Christmas Movies
Katherine Bindley
Every weekend around this time of year, the living-room TV in Tim Gates’s Pittsburgh home is tuned to the Hallmark Channel. His wife and teenage daughter watch the network’s original Christmas movies all day long.
Mr. Gates usually sits down and teases them about the movies, which feature predictable plotlines and tropes. “Next thing I know, I’m sucked in for a half-hour, 45 minutes,” he says.
A few weeks ago, after the Steelers game ended, he watched “Romance at Reindeer Lodge”—by himself. “Nobody else was around,” says Mr. Gates, 45 years old, a regional vice president of a staffing firm. Then, while traveling for work, he fell asleep in his hotel room to “Switched for Christmas.”
Mr. Gates isn’t ashamed to admit it: He is starting to like them.
Tim Gates, with his wife, Jennifer, and daughters Alexa and Sammi, isn’t ashamed to admit he is starting to like Hallmark Christmas movies. Photo: Gates family
Seasoned fans go a few steps further. They find Hallmark Christmas movies to be amazing, best watched in bulk and worth staying up all night for. Some say a steady routine of Hallmark Christmas movies is part of self-care, a bit like meditation.
Crown Media Family Networks, a subsidiary of the greeting-card maker, is the company behind more than 150 original Christmas movies that have run on its Hallmark-branded channels over the last decade. There are 22 new ones airing on the main Hallmark channel this year—they started Oct. 27—and another 15 new ones on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. Together with past years’ movies, they run practically round-the-clock, 10 to 12 a day. Some fans have found the best way to keep track of what they’ve watched is with a spreadsheet.
“I am often asked, when will Hallmark hit a ceiling on how many Christmas movies it produces every year?” said Michelle Vicary, the company’s executive vice president, programming and publicity, in an email. “So far, we are not there. There are viewers who tell us that Hallmark holiday on TV is something they wait for all year long.”
Hallmark Channel’s ‘Christmas at Pemberley Manor’ Photo: Robert Clark/Crown Media
Devoted watchers acknowledge that similar events unfold in each movie: Inclement weather tends to strand people in idyllic towns with names like Evergreen. There tends to be a scene where the characters bake Christmas cookies. The town’s Christmas festival tends to be a do-or-die event that stresses out the planners.
In the end, the two leads fall in love while relishing in the spirit of Christmas—at least the more secular parts. And it always snows, even when the stories are set in North Carolina or Tennessee.
Repetitive? More like reliable, says Camille Culbreath, 26, a flight attendant from Boston who watched five Hallmark Christmas movies one recent Saturday.
Camille Culbreath, right, says she now shares an affection for Hallmark Christmas movies with her mother, Jean Culbreath, left. Photo: Culbreath family
“I sat on my couch. I made breakfast, and then I made lunch, and the next thing I know it’s dinner time,” she says.
Ms. Culbreath started out much like Mr. Gates, making fun of her mom’s love of Hallmark movies, until about five years ago, when she “just got invested,” she says. She realized she actually likes cheesy, romantic stories about a big-city girl who goes to the country and finds a fiancé.
“I was, like, wait, that’s me,” she says. “I’m a big-city girl. I want to go to the country. I want to find an innkeeper to call my husband and we celebrate Christmas.”
Ms. Culbreath, who is biracial, says she notices the lack of diversity in Hallmark movies. “I always joke there’s one black person in the whole movie,” she says. “Either there’s one black lady or black guy who is in it who has a big role, or there’s one or two in the background that you don’t really pay attention to.”
The network recognized the need for more diversity and inclusion in its original movies and has created new partnerships to do so, company officials say. One result is “Christmas Everlasting,” which debuted last Saturday night and starred Tatyana Ali (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), Dennis Haysbert (“24”) and singer Patti LaBelle.
Aly McGuire, left, and her roommate, Rachel Rompala, both 19, say they discovered their shared love for Hallmark Christmas movies one night during their freshman year at college. Photo: Aly McGuire
Aly McGuire and her roommate, Rachel Rompala, both 19, say they discovered their shared love for Hallmark Christmas movies one night during their freshman year at Iowa State University. “I don’t think we stopped until 3:30 or 4 a.m., and we basically tried to do that as much as possible,” says Ms. McGuire.
This year, the pair made a spreadsheet to document the movies they had watched and to rate them. There are 11 different categories that affect the movies’ ratings, including: Does the movie make you want to cry, or throw up, or both? Several categories are reserved for evaluating male leads.
“We rate them based on their Christmas spirit, can he pull off a sweater, and his romanticness,” says Ms. Rompala. “We haven’t made a spreadsheet for the women yet.”
Their favorite so far has been “A Gift to Remember.” Former “The Young and the Restless” regular Peter Porte stars as a man who loses his memory after a collision with a bookstore worker—with whom he later falls in love.
In ‘A Gift to Remember,’ a man loses his memory after a collision with a bookstore worker—with whom he later falls in love. Photo: Daniel Power/Crown Media
“We rated that one off the charts,” says Ms. McGuire. “Our scale is 1 to 10, and I rated it a 16 out of 10, and Rachel rated it a 15 out of 10.”
Adriana Allegri, 52, a freelance writer from Chandler, Ariz., says she has been watching Hallmark Christmas movies for about 10 years, but things have really accelerated in the last two years. She has been waking up five mornings a week at 3 a.m. and watching Hallmark movies for two hours while she exercises. She has many saved on her DVR.
The movies take her back to a simpler time, and help her decompress when the news feels like too much. “It’s definitely escapist,” she says. “I can’t say that they’re high drama or they’re fantastic pieces of film.”
What happens after New Year’s Day when the Christmas movies no longer air regularly? Hallmark has plenty of other original films.
“Once Christmas is over, there’s going to be the Valentine’s ones, so that’ll be great,” she says. “I tend to do them year round.”
A scene from ‘Enchanted Christmas.’ Photo: Fred Hayes/Crown Media
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