‘Tis the season for watching silly sappy movies about small town folks who work hard but haven’t made time for love in their lives until Christmas comes along and changes everything. While the Hallmark channel made its reputation twenty-some years ago with this genre, now every streaming platform provides its audience with family friendly romances centered on extremely fictional small-town life.
A few years ago I began dipping into this line of made-for-tv films during December. Like all genre stories, there’s a rhythm that makes them easy on the emotions and provides feel-good background to the holiday preparation. While they are easy to parody (see Jimmy Fallon’s recent Christmas album) and there’s lots to laugh at in the cheesy nostalgia and compressed timelines, their increasing popularity seems rooted in a desire to eschew cynicism and complexity.
The simplicity of life in these movies appeals to us. They portray tight-knit communities, reconciliation between family members and neighbors, lots of time outdoors in beautiful settings, a focus on music and crafts, and frequently the local democratic process. These worlds are comprehensible. No community or Christmas celebration has ever looked like this in real life, but somehow they are tapping into a desire for finitude and thick social networks. And yes, there are hard choices to make about whether to risk it all for love (maybe after the death of a wonderful spouse, or at the expense of a hard-driving career).
Women are the presumed audience for Hallmark films and these romances do privilege the female gaze. Romance fiction has been criticized for its assumptions that women need to find love in order to be fulfilled at the expense of their own spiritual or personal formation. However, while family (usually but not exclusively heteronormative, and mostly White and upper middle class) is indeed at the core of these romances (and yes, it’s always a whole family, not just an individual who is involved in the love story), they consistently portray women as retaining their professional skills and economic independence while finding love.
While sometimes the men in the story are wealthy (occasionally secretly so), that is often the obstacle to overcome, as the main female characters want and need to retain their professional independence and pride. The princess story line is sporadically included but never involves a subsuming of the lady into the life narrative of the male lead. When the story line includes an overworked career woman choosing to come home and opt for the slower life of the small town, the final scenes of the film reassure the watcher that she found a way to use her professional skills back home.
However, lately I’ve decided that the greatest and possibly most insidious fiction peddled by holiday romance films is the triumph of the small business. The most frequent Christmas love stories seem to feature the ins and outs of small-town economics—completely in defiance of the realities of twenty-first century finance. The businesses almost always involved crafts or special skills in the making or repairing space. They allow the protagonist to support the community in meaningful ways and are frequently at the heart of the town’s desire to resist the encroachment of Big Business or an evil outside investor whose plans will undermine all that makes the village strong.
These economic plot lines appeal to us because in the service sector world, we are all-too-often making our money by sitting behind a computer screen and answering emails rather than acting in the way God created us to—being cultivators or creators or makers ourselves. Many of the romances in these stories are bolstered by one person’s encouragement of the other’s entrepreneurship. The women and men are able to triumph professionally as well as relationally.
The success of the family-run business in a dog-eat-dog world is vital to these holiday movies. On the one hand, this sort of entrepreneurial work-hard-and-achieve-success is what the American dream is made of. This is the free market at work, after all. But there is definitely a critique of late-stage capitalism here and the consolidation of economic systems and take-over by Big Business.
If the popularity of these movies is any indication, we are experiencing an agrarian nostalgia focused on handmade crafts and personal services, resistance to bureaucratic jobs where technology distances us from the meaning-making elements of our work. As a middle aged Gen Xer, the genre of my young adulthood was the New York City professional—making it big in the city was the dream. In these movies people are consistently finding that finitude and smallness in economic success provides the most lasting satisfaction, not only for the entrepreneurs, but for their neighbors and friends.
Capitalism embraces constant expansion—it isn’t enough to make a profit, we must be making more of a profit each year. The idea of just making a profit that allows the owner and employees to have a salary or pay the bills doesn’t fit with the business model of stamping out competition. It isn’t clear how any of the arts and crafts shops featured in the films make a profit or pay the bills, and sometimes this is the heart of the problem in the story. The “evil” big business investor sees the problem and wants to fix it. Most of the time good triumphs and creative thinking or the pulling together of the whole town allows the business to stay open or change to address the latest trend.
This is wishful thinking. It is the very belief in this Christmas magic that makes it seem that such village economics is possible. It’s part of the same fiction that makes it snow on Christmas day with such regularity, or reveals that the cute carpenter down the street is actually secretly a duke or prince with lots of money. The world we live in is all too frequently shaped by 5 or 6 large corporations and those businesses that are dependent on them. All too many jobs feel meaningless. Part of the pleasure of holiday romances is the notion of agency in the workplace, jobs that are connected to the community, and where folks can see the fruits of their labor.
I grew up in Appalachia, where small towns abound. Some of them are even cute and decorate for the holidays. They all used to have their own feed stores, schools a small grocery and pharmacy and dry goods stores—and usually a yearly festival (most often a harvest celebration, not Christmas). In the 1980s we could still see the remnants of the local economy around us. However, the draw of larger stores in bigger cities and greater ease of driving to them has undermined “Main Street” in these hamlets. Jobs are hard to come by, and few can make a living selling the work of their hands. In the suburbia that most folks in the US live in, it’s even more challenging because the structures of walkable retail are mostly gone. Strip malls segregated from large residential estates abound.
Yet, the longing for integrated lives remains: ones where we love and work and live in a visible community, and come together during hard times, with support from our friends in dealing with tough family members, and where good and love triumph. At Christmas each year we get a reminder that while we are stressed and overworked, the goal isn’t actually to stop working entirely. We don’t want a world without labor or professional calling. We do want to work hard, but we want that work to be in the service of a particular location and network of people, ones we can see and run into outside our homes and create a symbiotic relationship with.
Here’s to more Christmas movies that remind us of what we were created for. In the best case scenario they can produce dissatisfaction within us at our fragmented lives, provoking us to look for opportunities for integration and connection with our neighbors.
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