Hallmark Channel

The Christmas movies are showing on the Hallmark Channel now. They will continue for the next couple of months. Some are new and some are repeats.  They will all be repeats in the coming weeks as they get recycled through the schedule.

In some ways they are all repeats any way. The plots are almost identical. It's a classic "boy-meets-girl" scenario. One of them has forgotten the true meaning of Christmas and, by extension, the things in life that matter the most. It becomes the mission of the other to correct this problem and they fall in love along the way. The movie ends with their first kiss.

These movies are always sentimental, gentle, and romantic. They offer a nice respite from the news of the day/week. Even the people who don't like each other aren't evil.....just unpleasant. Everyone is still civil and polite. There are numerous cliches along the way, but somehow we don't mind.

What these movies don't have are gunfights, car chases, or explosions. There are no special effects or CGI. Generally the characters don't even raise their voices. Even the children are always well behaved and never have a full blown meltdown because "He's looking at me!!"

It's easy to make fun of the movies and their legion of fans, but we need to remember that all genres are cliche by their nature. In the westerns that I watched as a child there was often conflict between the stranger who rides into town and the authorities. Sometimes the stranger is the villain and other times he's the hero. Either way they were heading for a gunfight in the middle of the street by the end of the movie.

In todays action movie they spend the first ten minutes putting a cat in a tree and the next two hours getting it out. There is always a hero and an arch villain. Just like the western, they will meet at the end of the movie to settle things "once and for all".

In the super hero films the story lines are basically the same except everyone has a special power and they break entire cities or planets or some such during the final scenes.

  In an age where everything is an extravaganza. Where tragic events occur weekly, and if they aren't tragic enough the press embellishes just a bit. Where public outrage has been reduced to background noise. The Hallmark Channel has given us an oasis of life as it should be. Small, personal, full of love, kindness, and respect. Who wouldn't want to escape to that?