I'm an evolved person. I should be wandering around a museum. I should be at a college lecture series listening to someone analyze post-war Scandinavian economic strategies. I should be sipping fair trade coffee around a table of literary snobs discussing the role of masculinity in the later works of Ibsen and Tolstoy. I should be doing things both hoity and toity.
Instead, I am sitting here watching the girl from Full House as she finds Christmas love. After that, I will probably watch the OTHER girl from Full House as SHE finds Christmas love. Curse you, Hallmark Channel. I am once again under your incredibly stupid spell.
Each Yuletide season -- and by Yuletide season, I mean pretty much half the year -- the otherwise innocuous Hallmark Channel turns into a tinsel-covered cheesefest I like to call "CCN": the Caucasian Christmas Network. Twenty four hours a day, for months straight, they air nothing but made-for-Hallmark holiday romance movies. Like Christmas clockwork, every two hours someone will find their soulmate and have the perfect holiday season.
The Hallmark people aren't stupid. They know what people want, and they turn out dozens of these low-budgets lovefests every year. They all pretty much have the same plot. They all pretty much star Candace Cameron-Bure. And they're all pretty much insipid garbage. Yet every year, my TV drifts to that ridiculous channel. Sure, I should be watching C-Span. But you know what? It's cold outside, I'm sitting here with a cup of cocoa, and my house is bathed in magical twinkling lights and the smell of fresh balsam (courtesy Bath & Body Works. I'm not a heathen who actually brings nature indoors.)
Maybe I don't want to watch some esoteric art movie this time of year. Maybe I just want to watch people kiss under mistletoe and believe in Christmas magic. Sue me.
It really IS amazing how much these movies are alike, though. Most of them really DO have the same plot: Work-obsessed Big City Girl is in a loveless relationship with Big City Boyfriend, when she's suddenly forced into a last-minute holiday business trip to a small town that's economically depressed yet still looks like a Norman Rockwell paradise every Christmas. There she'll meet some hunky guy who's terrible at running his Christmas tree farm but great at being a single dad to whatever precocious child actor is assigned to Holiday Movie #304A.
Over the course of 3-4 days, she will fall in love with the hunky guy AND use her big city wits to save his tree farm from foreclosure. Snow will fall. ONE kiss will occur. Everyone will live happily ever after.
Or will they? The more I think about these movies, the more I realize there's one big plot hole. You know who doesn't live happily ever after? Big City Boyfriend. He gets dumped for Christmas -- and the worst part? It's usually not his fault.
In the first year or two that Hallmark was churning these things out, Big City Boyfriend was usually a reprehensible jerk we couldn't wait to dump. Sometimes he was revealed as a cheater right out the gate. Boo on you, Big City Boyfriend. But Hallmark soon discovered you can't make Big City Boyfriend a complete ass, because it reflects poorly on our beloved heroine. If she's a perfect person (which she always is), how could she have ever had such lousy taste in men?
In the more recent Hallmark movies I've seen, Big City Boyfriend is far less of a heel. Sometimes he doesn't even exist at all. Sometimes, our heroine's only boyfriend is her job. When Big City Boyfriend IS there, his biggest crime is that he works too much, or he works for the company that's trying to foreclose the Christmas tree farm. Either way, he's not that bad of a guy. He's just not THE guy.
Ergo, here's my idea for a TRULY great Hallmark Christmas movie: Big City Girl gets sent to Nowheresville, meets hunky guy, falls in love, blah blah blah. As is the common trope, Big City Boyfriend turns up in Nowheresville to surprise Big City Girl on Christmas Eve. They realize they've grown apart as people, and Big City Boyfriend is gently dumped. But instead of following her back to the party, instead the film follows the newly-minted ex-boyfriend back to the Big City.
We see him go home, microwave a Salisbury Steak TV dinner, and eat in lonely silence. Better yet, in a totally meta moment, we see him flip his TV to the Hallmark Channel and watch a stupid Christmas romance movie alone while a single tear rolls down his cheek. The next day, he goes to his family's house and we see the heartbreaking moment when his mom asks, "Where's Jill?" and he has to reveal that Jill is clearly an insane person who chucked their entire relationship away to move in with a stranger she met three days ago.
But then we follow him to the station to catch the train home, and there's only one other person on the platform. It's Small Town Girl. She just finalized a bitter divorce with her jerk of an ex-husband. No longer would she have to put her dreams on hold for his stupid Christmas tree farm that only makes money one month out of the year.
"Say," says Big City Boyfriend. "Would you like to come over?"
"Sure," says Small Town Girl. "After all, my precocious child is staying with my ex this weekend."
"We could watch a Christmas movie on the Hallmark Channel?"
"Nah," replies Small Town Girl. "Let's just make out. Those movies suck."
Roll credits. Dear Hollywood, please send my check to the usual address.
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