Help! This Hallmark Hater Just Realized Her Life Is A Corny Christmas Movie Plot

Hallmark holiday movies turn this otherwise-Christmas-lover into quite the Scrooge. I absolutely hate them — and for all the obvious reasons: Their premises are ludicrous and dialogue labored, turning every predictable storyline into a corny cliche.

So you can imagine my dismay when I realized my own “original” love story is nothing more than one bad Hallmark plot, and here’s the pitch.

The city-dwelling female protagonist (me) is forced into a small town (my childhood home in the Midwest backwoods) due to an unforeseen catastrophe (coronavirus) when she meets a man who will change her life. A Christmas surprise (a last-minute $35 flight to spend the holiday with his family) moves the plot forward, and just when more calamity (friends dropping left and right to Covid quarantine) threatens to throw things off course just in time for the big New Year’s Eve bash, the main characters improvise with a romantic year’s end stuck at home and his first utterance of “I love you” (though, in true Hallmark fashion, I was the first one to admit it secretly in these pages, in a holiday article no less — gag!).

Long story short, through all the ups and downs, the leading lady realizes climbing the career ladder isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In slowing down and returning to her roots, she sees marriage, community, and familial proximity as the blessing it is (I moved back to the Midwest and married the co-star).

Nauseating though it may be, there’s something about a cookie-cutter storyline like this that resonates. After all, Hallmark — or Lifetime or Netflix — devotees are aplenty. Something in these derivative plots keeps viewers coming back for more and thus keeps Hallmark and other streamers shoveling out slight variations year after year. It has to be more than the conventionally attractive gentlemen on the posters since those are ubiquitous in Hollywood. So what is it?

As hard as it is to get past the cheesiness and admit it, perhaps the reason is that Hallmark has its finger on the pulse of something the rest of our culture seems to be missing. Maybe lonely thirty-something ladies on the verge of their biological clocks timing out are coming to the sad realization that their high-rise apartments and corporate bosses offering to fund their abortions don’t really love them back. Maybe an investment in a tight-knit community actually has a higher return than an investment in crypto. Coming home to “fur babies,” having sex with strangers, traveling the world solo, and doing everything “for the ‘Gram” tends to lose its luster when midlife approaches and those distractions are exposed as a bitter end, not a means to a fulfilling one.

Could it be that more and more of today’s women are sick of the radical feminist messages of independence that have promised empowerment but left them more miserable, alienated, intolerant, and confused?

By many accounts, the longer women have internalized the liberation message, the more their happiness has declined. As Zachary