Loving Kitsch or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hallmark
By Sean Colligan
In line with being more of an American phenomenon when it comes to TV broadcasting over the holiday period—we’re all a lot more used to either seeing Charlton Heston racing chariots in biblical epics or Kenneth Williams and Sid James cracking lurid jokes, a sort of strange marriage of the sacred and profane—the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies enjoy a limited following in Northern Ireland. I mostly knew the company for their greeting cards, only recently discovering they release a whole repertoire of feel-good stories for the small screen. Perhaps it is more accurate to say they have been rereleasing the same story for years: a woman with a high-paying professional career returns to her hometown, reconnecting with ‘the one who got away’ and the quaint community she left for the big city. There are never bad endings. How can there be bad endings in a town where people don’t have to lock their doors at night?
Yet these clichéd plots attract a wide audience in the States, with over 29 million tuning into Hallmark’s holiday programming over the whole of 2024 [1]. There is something unfairly enticing about the innocence of their movies, each a time-less capsule of a small-town America that never really existed outside of postcards and Norman Rockwell paintings. Perhaps their vast viewership takes comfort in the fact that there are no surprises, no plot twists; everything is always resolved, and the things that do go wrong—they need a smidgen of drama after all—always work themselves out. The simple life is a contagious fantasy, and the staying power of the Hallmark movie reflects our attachment to the good old days, or more so, how we choose to remember them.
Does Hollywood’s obsession with pumping out endless remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels not speak to our fear of the new and our fixation on the past? I’ll let the box office be the judge, where this year’s live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon grossed over $636 million from a budget of $150 million. Where a discerning moviegoer might roll their eyes at a Hallmark movie, they will happily go and see a pointless rehash of Lilo & Stitch or The Lion King, rereleases daubed with a CGI veneer solely for the pursuit of profit. But if you peel back the fancy bark, the bare essences of these movies are the exact same. To use a grim and probably unfitting metaphor, it’s like going to a funeral home and seeing someone’s remains—wherein most funeral directors do a satisfactory job but never life-like—and then going to a mausoleum where a famous corpse, once perfectly preserved by some magic in a bottle, has been subject to some sort of modern experimental treatment, and is now being flogged in in its awkward, uncanny valley appearance to a mass of devoted punters, all desperate to see something they have seen a million times before.
Have we no shame? Why do we look down upon something wholesome and innocent because it’s low-brow, while cynically rewarding ‘proper’ movies that try to ape something they could never dream of holding a candle to? We ought not to be guilty of our guilty pleasures, whatever they may be—Hallmark movies, Nickelback, Gossip Girl—and should strive for a new kind of sincerity in the digital age. Irony, especially in a country where taking the mick is the norm and anybody who has an idea about anything is said to be taking a notion, may help us put a funny spin on the monotonous comings and goings of life, but it also restricts us from being able to enjoy what we like. Let us indulge in an imagined past, treat ourselves with a little escapism and take a reprieve from the misery and drudgery of the world. I would much rather be subjected to cloying festive charm, C-list actors and predictable romances than the dreaded 24-hour news cycle, where every global atrocity and awful event is beamed into my living room via satellite. I know which one I would rather sit down and watch. Do you?
References
- Roeloffs, Mary Whitfill. “Hallmark’s Last New Christmas Movie Comes Out This Weekend—Here’s A Supersized Guide To All 32 New Holiday Films.” Forbes. 20 December 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/12/20/hallmarks-last-new-christmas-movie-comes-out-this-weekend-heres-a-supersized-guide-to-all-32-new-holiday-films
- “How to Train Your Dragon (2025).” Box Office Mojo. 13 June 2025. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt26743210/
