The Case of the Hallmark Christmas Movie
There are some films that go hand in hand with the holiday season. These are movies that we watch every year with our families because they remind us of our childhood and the spirit of Christmas. But in the past couple decades, a different kind of holiday movie has taken the season by storm. They’re known for their cheesy lines, simplistic plotlines, and by-the-numbers predictability. Many fans claim to watch these made-for-TV movies as a guilty pleasure, while others have fully embraced their comforting tropes. We’re talking, of course, about Hallmark Christmas movies.
You know the deal: He’s a small town business owner of some kind (Christmas trees/coffee shop/bakery) and she’s a successful woman from the city with a vague job title. Why don’t we know what she does? Well, that’s because it doesn’t matter; she’s quitting that job by the end of the movie. They were lovers once, or maybe she left him at the altar, and this Christmas, they may just find their way back to each other again. Each Christmas, these cookie cutter movie plots dominate social media because they are an easy target. But this got us wondering, when did it all start? Over the last twenty years or so, Hallmark essentially invented their own genre, which is honestly pretty impressive. So today, we’re getting a better look at the history of Hallmark Christmas movies and discussing the formula that has made them so successful.
So grab your favorite movie snack and cuddle up next to a roaring TV, it’s time to talk about Hallmark Christmas movies.
It’s important to remember that Hallmark is first and foremost a greeting card company. So let’s talk about how it got its start!
In the early 1910s, Joyce Clyde Hall and his brother Rollie created a business selling picture postcards. Over time, this endeavor snowballed into the most well-known card company in America. In 1928, the Hall brothers were the first to advertise their greeting card business nationally, adding the word Hallmark to the back of every card, since it was a term used by goldsmiths as a mark of quality. The company wouldn’t officially change its name from Hall Brothers to Hallmark until 1954. Over the last 100+ years, Hallmark molded the greeting card industry to what it is today, securing valuable licensing from companies like Walt Disney, and expanding their sales to include ornaments and gifts. The Hall Brothers are even credited with inventing modern gift wrap.
In an attempt to advertise to a bigger audience, Hallmark began sponsoring radio programs, to great effect. In 1951, television network NBC approached Hallmark with another advertising opportunity. They asked the card company to sponsor the first Opera written specifically for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. JC Hall agreed, hoping that the program would serve as a “thank you” to Hallmark customers for buying greeting cards that season. The broadcast was a huge success, and the company received thousands of letters and telegrams thanking them for sponsoring it. Thus began a series of specials known as Hallmark Television Playhouse and later, The Hallmark Hall of Fame.
Amahl and the Night Visitors aired on December 24th, 1951, making it the first Hallmark Christmas movie. It was written by composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Menotti was inspired to write an opera about a young boy and his encounter with The Magi, the three kings that visited Jesus on the night of his birth. While celebrating Christmas in Italy as a child, it was the Magi that brought presents to children, and not Santa Claus.
The story follows a young shepherd boy named Amahl, who likes to tell tall tales. One night, three wonderful and mysterious strangers arrive at the home where Amahl and his mother live, asking if they could stay for the night. Amahl is enamored by the men as they tell him that they bear gifts for a miraculous infant.
The opera became a regular holiday tradition, and theaters all over the world perform it every Christmas season. Two years later, it made history as the first sponsored television event in color!
Hallmark Television Playhouse, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, and The Hallmark Channel
Like we said before, Amahl and the Night Visitors started the television program now known as “The Hallmark Hall of Fame.” It promotes itself as the longest-running and most award-winning series on TV. It began as a weekly program and by the mid-1950s, it morphed into a series of specials that would air several times a year.
Major networks like CBS and NBC would air special presentations of these movies, which tended to be literary adaptations and plays. Eventually, Hallmark began producing their own original movies to great success. The presentations often coincided with a holiday, reminding viewers to buy greeting cards. Hallmark would even produce their own commercials to play during the movie. Because of this, commercial breaks tended to be shorter for Hallmark presentations, which viewers enjoyed.
The two-minute commercials were produced as short-films with their own titles. They became famous for making viewers cry, and when Hallmark got its own channel, the commercials from the 80s and 90s influenced the channel’s branding.
In 1991, Hallmark formed Crown Media, which changed its name to Hallmark Media in 2022. In 2001 it took over a religious network called Odyssey, and The Hallmark Channel was born. For almost the first 10 years, the channel showed a variety of family entertainment that included its Hall of Fame movies from the 1950s up until the 2000s.
According to a New Yorker article by Sarah Larson published in 2019, it was Bill Abbott, the former CEO of Crown Media, that encouraged the network to lean into Christmas. In 2009, introduced its most famous programming, The Countdown to Christmas. Starting in 2011, The Hallmark Channel began showing Christmas movies 24 hours a day from late October until Christmas. The strategy worked, with viewers turning on the channel to have on non-stop throughout the holiday season. Because of this, Hallmark is consistently one of the top-viewed cable channels, often ranking number 1 with women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four.
The Hallmark Timeline
While it’s easy to make fun of the Hallmark formula, there’s no arguing with results. The idea behind a Hallmark original isn’t to give viewers something they haven’t seen before, but instead the opposite. Still, we wondered how Hallmark went from producing one opera in 1951 to essentially churning out several versions of the same movie every year. So, we watched a whole bunch of Hallmark movies. You know, for research purposes.
Let’s break down what we know of the Hallmark movie timeline:
In the 1950s, most Hallmark presentations were adaptations of books and plays. Hamlet from 1953 was one of the most notable.
In the 1960s, Hallmark started producing more original content starring film and TV stars from the time, like A Cry of Angels, which was a dramatization of composer George Handel’s life. It starred names like Maureen O’Hara and Hermione Gringold. The film we (Robin) watched from the 1960s was The Littlest Angel. This is a musical about a little boy that dies and is introduced to Heaven by a guardian angel played by Fred Gwynne (AKA Herman Munster). The film also starred Cab Calloway.
Many of the Hallmark films of the 1970s are available to watch on YouTube. The 1973 live-action production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is one of them. The Christmas movie that we watched was called, Have I Got a Christmas for You. The list of films from the 1970s also includes a lot of book and stage-to-screen adaptations, but the company continued to create their own original productions.
The Hallmark movies of the 1980s tended to have a little more of a serious tone. Holidays were not the main focus of many of these films, which included classics like The Secret Garden, a film we grew up watching. We actually could not find a 1980s Christmas Hallmark movie, so if anyone listening knows of one, please send it our way! We found ones from the 1980s that have aired on the network, but none that were originally sponsored or produced by Hallmark.
As we went down the list, the 1990s was the first time when we started to see the formulas and tropes that would eventually lead us to the Hallmark movies of today. Movies like A Season for Miracles and A Holiday to Remember seemed to have the structure on which most modern Hallmark Christmas films are built. Each focused on a female lead, either arriving in a small town for the first time or returning home. Both had romantic interests that were in law enforcement (the men usually have some sort of interesting job as a pillar of the community). Interestingly enough, both films seemed to have heavier plotlines involving the welfare of children. In one film, the children’s mother is incarcerated and they have been kidnapped by their well-meaning (but unemployed) aunt.
The Hallmark movies of the 2000s were very similar to those of the 90s, though over time the main story conflicts began to focus on the adults in the romantic relationship and less on children. The stakes seem to be lowered overall. There were still some movies with heavier themes, like Silver Bells from 2005, which is about a young boy that runs away to New York City, and almost dies at the film’s climax.
Like we said before, the 2010s was the beginning of Countdown to Christmas, and this is where we really saw a shift in the film content. In the early 2010s, the movies still had some of the seriousness that remained in the films of the 90s and 2000s. But by 2015, Crown Media started its own production company, managing almost every aspect of production including costumes, location, and casting.
In 2014, Hallmark premiered Christmas Under Wraps, which Bill Abbott (then CEO) considered to be the turning point for the channel. The film was the essential blueprint for many to come. It had a star that brought on nostalgia (Candace Cameron Bure), a romantic plot, and of course, the real Santa Claus.
Hallmark movies today are designed to depict an idealized version of America. They’re meant to feel like a metaphorical warm blanket, allowing viewers to relax and shut out the potentially stressful holiday season.
They achieve this by appealing to the most audiences possible. The runtime averages 90 to 120 minutes long, so the characters don’t overstay their welcome.
There is very little if any sexual contact between characters, maybe some kissing near the end of the movie (maybe after a proposal).
There are usually two love interests, one that is right, and one that isn’t. Mr. Wrong isn’t usually a bad guy, he just isn’t the right fit. Choosing between them is often a large conflict in the story. Do you see what we mean by lowered stakes?
Unlike the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies of the 80s, each Hallmark Channel original Christmas movie has a happy ending.
Author and critic Doyle Greene has said about Hallmark’s particular brand of movie, “The genre is thoroughly standardized to allow for mass (culture) production precisely and holiday season consumption because the Christmas films are not expected to supply something new but quite the opposite: they are required to supply more of the same by trafficking in familiarity and nostalgia – like a new set of ornaments to put on the Christmas tree every holiday season that can mix-and-match with the old ones because they are no different.”
With Hallmark having its own production company, each film has a standard look and feel.
Almost every modern Hallmark channel movie is filmed in fifteen days.
The sets are “actuals,” meaning that they use existing locations instead of having to build sets on sound stages. Most of the shoots are done in Canada, where the tax credits make it more affordable.
Filming takes place all year, even in summer, when they have to take precautions because of the heat. It’s important to remember that Hallmark makes films for other holidays, too!
The studio uses foam to simulate snow. It melts within fifteen minutes, which is better for production than shaved ice, which could melt much faster.
Their budget is often under $2 million. They make a lot of their money from advertisements
Between 2009 and 2021 they had made 300 Christmas movies as well as some Hanukkah films as well.
Casting in Hallmark movies is just as important as any other part of production. When the studio began bringing in younger stars from recent popular TV shows, their viewership increased. They learned that they could draw people in by hiring actors with a certain amount of built-in nostalgia, like Danica McKeller, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years.
Candace Cameron Bure has acted in about 30 Hallmark productions, which was surpassed by Lacey Chabert. You might remember her better as Gretchen Weiners in Mean Girls or Eliza Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys.
Traditionally Hallmark has stuck to a formula. This formula tends to include straight white leads at the center of their stories. It was not until 2018 when Christina Milian and Jerrika Hinton made history as the first female black leads in their respective movies. (Memories of Christmas and A Majestic Christmas.) Sadly that was only 2 of the 37 Christmas movies they made that year. While Hallmark has made small improvements in their diversity the proportion is still not great. In 2022 they had their first same sex couple in The Holiday Sitter and their first film about Kwanzaa in Holiday Heritage.
Tropes
(There are so many that several people have made Hallmark movie Bingo cards)
Main character goes home for Christmas
Invariably leads to hometown hero as love interest
Dogs bring people together
Single parents
Snow on Christmas
Holiday Competitions
Small towns > big cities
Corporate big wigs want to shut down something important
Santa is real/ angels real
Family over career
Boyfriend is a Prince
After Hallmark’s success, other networks eventually followed with their own copycat kinds of movies. Some of these are so similar that it can be pretty confusing what movies are actually Hallmark.
Netflix has its own list of films that come to mind when we think of this particular brand of Christmas movie. For example:
The Princess Switch
A Christmas Prince
The Knight Before Christmas
Lifetime now has its own annual Christmas movie programming called “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime.”
Great American Channel, which was co-founded by Bill Abbott, the former CEO of Crown Media, also has similar programming.
When Hallmark aired an ad for Zola, a wedding planning website, that featured a lesbian couple, some viewers complained. Abbott pulled the ad from the air and did not restore it even after people at the network asked him to continue airing the commercial. Some inside sources have said that Abbott’s mishandling of the controversy jump started his removal as CEO.
Modern Hallmark Christmas movies have never promised to be good, they’re just meant to entertain. For some fans, they’re simply background noise during the holiday season. To others, they are a regular form of entertainment that gets them through the season. When we set out to make this episode, it was because we wanted to know how these TV programs evolved from operas and Shakespeare to predictable romances. It certainly took us on a journey that we found to be much more interesting than the movies themselves.
But if there is a takeaway, it’s that not all Hallmark movies are the same. We found some Hall of Fame movies to be interesting, while some of them brought back that all-powerful nostalgia. And every once in a while, we’d find one that was just fun to watch. So, we hope you enjoyed our investigation into the empire of Hallmark. We cared enough to do our very best.