Pop Culture Confessions: Hallmark Countdown to Christmas

Deck the halls with mixed feelings.

The first holiday movies I remember truly loving were The Santa Clause and Miracle on 34th Street. As a kid, I looked forward to watching them every year. We owned them on VHS until VHS stopped being a thing and then we had the DVDs.

When Elf came out in 2003, I was as charmed by it as everyone else. My friends and I loved it so much that we even planned an Elf-themed party in high school. For whatever reason, it never actually happened, but I can still recall my—admittedly brilliant—design for the invitations. I spent hours pasting grainy colored printouts of Buddy to folded cardstock and decorating them with glitter and sequins. (Seriously, what happened to that party? We were going to have a spaghetti/candy buffet and everything!)

From there, I moved on to the high school phase of obsession with The Holiday and Love, Actually. With the help of these movies, my lovesick, never-been-kissed teenage heart came to believe that the holiday season would be a great—no, the perfect—time for all of the romantic magic I’d so far missed out on to fall into my lap.

More recently, a new category of festive films has assumed first priority in my personal December line-up: the Hallmark holiday movie.

My feelings about these movies are not, however, without their complexities—which means it’s high time for a Christmassy edition of Pop Culture Confessions.

As a reminder, Pop Culture Confessions is a place where I break down the media I love but feel weird (or worse) about. I’ll give myself the space to fangirl while also being transparent about my ambivalence (or worse) and how I might be able to untangle it. You can check out the last installment HERE.

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So let’s talk about the Hallmark Countdown to Christmas.

Every year, the cloyingly sweet Hallmark channel—along with its slightly less cloyingly sweet sibling, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries—celebrates the impending holiday season with a full line-up of festive original programming. Countdown to Christmas usually has its official kick-off in late October, but don’t worry! Hallmark finds ways to pepper its schedule with Christmas and Christmas-adjacent movies year-round. Christmas in July, anyone?

I can honestly tell you that I do not watch Hallmark at any other time of the year—nor had I ever tuned in before stumbling into my first Countdown to Christmas experience sometime around 2017. I offer this as a disclaimer not to judge year-round fans of the network, but to illustrate just how much my December entertainment slate has changed in recent years.

Here’s a little snapshot of Countdown to Christmas by the numbers, thanks to a Forbes article published last week:

• Hallmark first staged this major television event in 2009 with just nine movies. (If you go as hard for Hallmark’s Christmas celebrations as I do, you know that just is the operative word.)

• This year alone, the two Hallmark networks will release a combined 40 new movies.

• More than 300 movies have been released as part of Countdown to Christmas over the years.

• In 2021, Nielsen estimated that more than 80 million people would watch at least a few minutes of a Hallmark movie each season.

• I won’t bore you with the details of the individual movies that have dropped so far in 2023, but the Forbes article has some pretty wild stats about where Hallmark stacks up relative to other cable channels. Let’s just say that people seem much more interested in a little holiday cheese than they do in… well, most other things.

As far as I can remember, I sort of accidentally watched my first Hallmark Christmas movie in 2017. It was a night that Matt was out at a work event and I turned it into a cozy night for myself. I enjoyed it enough, but it wasn’t until the following year that I really got down to business. 2018 was an extremely challenging year for me and my family, and by the time the holidays rolled around, I could think of nothing but curling up on the couch and letting myself fall into a loop of perpetual Hallmark movies.

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Currently Reading: Wellness by Nathan Hill

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow, I am loving this one. Few things make me happier than a big chunky tome of a book—and this 624-pager turned me into the heart-eyed emoji as soon as I saw it. Better still is what’s on the inside: the sweeping story of a young relationship that turns into a marriage that turns into a family with all of the complications you might expect. There are also threads of alternative wellness culture, popular science, influencers, and art/technology intersection. I’ll be sad when this one’s over.

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Since then, Countdown to Christmas has become a non-negotiable element of the holiday season in our home. Matt gets into it, too! Often, we’re totally in on the joke—we don’t actually think these are good movies in the traditional sense—but we also genuinely look forward to tuning in as much as possible.

'Tis the season to kick off festive reading!

Hallmark holiday movies bring me a lot of joy, but I’m not blind to the aspects of them that are less than holly, jolly, etc. I’m certainly not the first person who’s written about this, but I’m still here to confess.

Here’s why I don’t feel great about tuning in every year…