True love is always in season
(Originally published September 2024)
Hallmark Christmas movie season is coming soon. I can’t wait.
I’m not ashamed to admit that Hallmark movies have become the background entertainment to my yuletide activities. I do my best baking and gift wrapping when I hear sleigh bells and lines like, “Holly, I need you to drive up to Kringle Corners a week before Christmas to mount a surprise takeover of the failing mistletoe processing factory.”
Off goes the lovely Holly, an ambitious corporate executive who loves her fast-paced life in the city and whose only apparent character flaw is that she’s never heard of winter boots.
She and Lance Balsam, the owner of the factory (36, charming, and handsome, but somehow still single), get off to a rocky start when he accidentally drives her face into a snowbank. But within a day they are building a snowman together.
They are meant for each other.
On Christmas Eve, after Holly’s secret takeover is exposed, she will tell Lance she’s decided to cancel it, abandon her career, and help him revitalize the business. Then they will declare their true love for each other and share their first kiss—a long but respectfully dry one.
It’s perfect cinema. A friend of mine, however, scoffs at Hallmark’s unrealistic plots and shallow characters.
Shallow? Hardly. Until now, Holly hasn’t enjoyed Christmas, because it reminds her of her grandpa, who died in a freak Zamboni accident years ago. And, until he met her, Lance often wished he had become a J. Crew model instead of pursuing his master’s in mistletoe engineering. These characters have layers.
“My friend says that Holly, like me, is blinded by the twinkle lights strung all over the place. ”
My friend persists, asking whether Holly has considered that Kringle Corners doesn’t have DoorDash or a Starbucks or bars that stay open past 9 p.m. And that it’s 35 miles to the nearest brow technician. Life is rough in the country.
And is Lance ready to settle down with this stranger? Their most intimate moment so far was when she playfully dabbed frosting on his nose during a late-night cookie baking session. (To be fair, by Hallmark standards this merits a hard R rating.)
My friend says that when Holly comes on at the factory, she’ll displace the kindly old man who has run the shop floor for the past 40 years. And she’ll eliminate a host of inefficiencies, such as the daily 3 p.m. Christmas carol singalong. Heads will roll.
I don’t want to hear any more. But my friend goes on.
Holly will also question why the mistletoe factory ramps up production the week before Christmas. If anyone ever got out of this godforsaken backwater, they’d know that Christmas décor hits the shelves soon after Labor Day. They’ve missed the entire season.
Worst of all, Holly may find, too late, that Lance plays Call of Duty for up to eight hours each night and has a habit of responding to her questions by saying, “Ex-squeeze me?” and waiting for her to laugh.
As for Lance, he might not be willing to learn the names of the 750 Beanie Babies in Holly’s collection. And he may look differently at her when she crawls into bed wearing a CPAP mask.
My friend says that Holly, like me, is blinded by the twinkle lights strung all over the place. She might not be prepared for the rest of the year, when Kringle Corners reverts to its true self: a dull, gray, factory town where dreams go to die.
Maybe my friend is right: It’s the cozy Christmas vibe, not the stories, that draws me to these movies. Maybe I’d be more skeptical about love at first sight if the action wasn’t set in December.
As it happens, the other day I saw a Hallmark Channel listing for The Pumpkin Patch Promise. In it, a debonair developer goes to sleepy Apple Dumpling Junction during peak foliage to buy a struggling pumpkin farm and build condos on it. Instead, after a week, he proposes to the pretty, young farm owner, who until then has felt sad every autumn after her grandpa was juiced in a freak cider press accident.
I had to watch it.
My friend is going to hate me for saying it, but the pumpkin pie, the harvest festival, and the wool sweaters got to me. The two lovers are barely acquainted, but I just know they’re going to make it.
