By Joe Mitchell
Giant snowflakes fall silently from the heavens, landing on a group of carolers singing “Silent Night” in the middle of a charming town square. One also lands on the chiseled face of a 30-something man with kind eyes and broad shoulders covered in a tight flannel shirt. He sings with a full voice, yet somehow, we can sense an empty heart. Cut to the same snowflake falling through skyscrapers amid the blare of sirens and car horns. The snowflake lands in a muddy puddle as a taxicab sprays dirty water all over the tailored suit of an attractive woman in sunglasses screaming into her cell phone about a difficult client at a large law office.
Swap out singing carolers and a large law office with a family-owned hardware store and multinational big-box store. Do a quick gender swap. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever the juxtaposition, you have all the pieces for another Hallmark Christmas movie. What does matter is that two people from two different worlds will somehow meet each other, hate each other, realize they really aren’t that different, fall in love, save the town’s mill, bookstore, historic library or any other small-town entity, and live happily ever after.
It’s a formula as old as time or at least as old as 1951, when the first Hallmark Christmas movie aired and America’s love affair with a vanilla romance, thin plot line, elementary-school sex scenes and wishful thinking led women to believe their relationship is absolute shite when compared to the elegant beauty, magical emotions and deep passion of “real Hallmark love.” This allowed them all to filter their relationship through this flatscreen sieve and process all its shortcomings to provide some relief from it in the form of fictional impromptu snowball fights, hayrides or, if time allows, a meteor shower on a moonlit night while holding hands with a stranger.
Let me say that the annual viewing of the Hallmark Christmas movies is not just for women and heterosexual white couples, but this is the audience for whom it was originally constructed. Hallmark has dutifully moved along with the times so we can now find any manner of relationships with a mixture of races, ages and socioeconomic levels to please every viewer. So I apologize for any slight, real or imagined, misogynistic or otherwise as well as the obvious cliches.
This is where we wonderless rubes come in. As a modern man I feel emotion about as deep as one should or perhaps could in this rough and tumble world and I am not averse to a good cry when convention requires, such as the death of a loved one, or when prompted by a TikTok video of a formerly blind child seeing for the first time, or a yellow lab saving a kitten in a snowstorm. But the Hallmark algorithm is built for this specific purpose. Once the piffle has finished and the deluge of tears subsided, our wives look across the room at us eating a second dinner over the sink wearing just a t-shirt, in our full Winnie-the-Pooh grandeur and they can’t hide their contempt at what might have been. But after 30 seconds or so, reality sets in, the fantasy dissipates and they realize they’ve once again been duped by the “Hallgorithm,” because in fact, their husband is simply a good guy with a warm heart and blissful indifference. But like every bad drug, they always want more, and their corporate dealer is happy to oblige and feed their habit.
Now I’d be happy to leave it there — with a few looks of disappointment and some polite suggestions about weight loss or more couples dates, because, frankly, I want that stuff, too. But if I could reach out to the dark lords of Hallmark, I would say, “What about us?”
What about the men of the world who would love to find a holiday-themed production that makes our hearts both sing and race. All I’m saying is there are scenes in which our hero is running through a pumpkin patch or a snow-covered country road after the woman he loves. Couldn’t Hallmark just as easily put him on a KTM 450 with a stage 2 Rottweiler power kit and a snowplow to jump over to pursue her? Also, there’s always the annoying and insensitive boyfriend in the city who half-heartedly tries to win the woman over and take her back to that beautiful uptown tri-split close to the park with a doorman. Why not arm him with some throwing knives, two Sig P229s tucked into a shoulder strap and a cute little McGuffin he hid on her key ring and must get back to a Russian madman who wants to destroy….okay, maybe that’s too much. But Hallmark could truly save Christmas if they put couples back together during the holidays, watching movies together in bed, with cold drinks, snacks and warm fuzzy feelings — right out of a Hallmark movie.
