Hallmark's Christmas movies are part of a culture war their viewers are losing
The world the network depicts is fading fast.
By Jeb Lund
Jeb Lund is a former political columnist for the Guardian and Rolling Stone and co-host of the podcast Dave and Jeb Aren't Mean.
Dec. 23, 2019 at 6:00 a.m. EST
On Oct. 31, the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel aired the film “Nostalgic Christmas,” a title whose name represents “coals to Newcastle” levels of redundancy. A few weeks later, the network found itself caving to anti-gay activists over an ad for the wedding site Zola, which featured a lesbian wedding and kiss, then apologizing to the LGBTQ community for that reflexive capitulation — a perfectly executed double-cave.
To the untrained eye, these moments might seem disconnected, but in the words of the only book everyone reads in the Hallmark universe, they were the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future arriving all at once. The world of Hallmark often resembles a kind of rear-guard action in a culture war that the network’s prime demographic is losing. The jobs, homes, community and security in the bleached pastoral hamlets showcased in the Hallmark universe are dwindling, increasingly as unreal as their TV presentation.
“Nostalgic Christmas,” one of the 40 new movies Hallmark rolled out this season, was about a toy company executive who gives up on the rollout of a “computerized programmable horse that you can teach to talk” in favor of maintaining her father’s small-town shop selling handcrafted wooden toys, while a rich person kept a local mill open out of the goodness of deus ex machina. Calling a Hallmark Christmas movie “nostalgic” is like calling steak “beefy.” All the information was implied, but you went and made it overt anyway. No enthusiast of either mistakes the content. Hallmark deliberately evokes the visual language of Norman Rockwell’s Christmas paintings, a postwar consensus of peak fictional Americana that purportedly exists beyond the political.
But like, well, literally everything, this vision of America is the result of political choices. Hallmark’s movies are stridently anti-metropolitan, almost always beginning with a heroine fleeing the city on some pretext or another. The geography of her personal rescue takes the form of small towns and pastoral settings, where everyone has a nice house and a car and is probably a small-business owner or about to improve themselves by becoming one. Blue-collar jobs exist, but they pay at artisanal rates. And cratered school budgets and bankrupt shelters are rescued by private donors; in a world that cannot mention taxes, the commons only ever existed via the goodness of unnamed hearts.
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Excellent analogy. 
Now I can steer clear knowing the gist of the movies without actually watching them.
The drinking game seems an apt response.
I'll be heading to my mothers and sister/brother in law's place today for a few days. Evangelical Christians, who my sister has hinted at least that she and her husband support Trump. This is the type of "entertainment" I will have to sit through. I do that for the sake of my older mother in respect for her. She enjoys them. I remember as a kid seeing how she could whip through hundreds of Harlequin romance novels every year. But it means hours of sitting numbly staring at a screen while violins wail, skys open up to heavenly light, tears are flowing for all the carefully placed tear jerk moments. And of course the miracle that happens, because the protagonist is such a good Christian do-gooder.
Have a happy holiday season George. I argue with you too much, but be assured nothing is personal. Cheers.
And I wish it would end, quite frankly. 
