And what it says about modern romance.
There’s a subgenre of holiday film that’s so familiar in its narrative structure, the TikTok parodies it’s inspired have almost eclipsed the popularity of the films themselves.
One video, liked some 144,000 times on the app, is about a “hotshot lawyer” who returns to her small hometown, where she’s wooed by the owner of a Christmas tree business. In another, a “New York executive” falls for a flannel-clad man, who also happens to be in the Christmas tree business.
Sound familiar? This formula — in which the career-driven woman finds love by abandoning the big city for a Norman Rockwell-esque paradise — has been used in a lot of Christmas-themed films. More seem to get churned out every year — and not just by Hallmark. Lifetime, BET, and Great American Family have all produced their own twists on this conceit.
By my count, at least a dozen of these formulaic productions have come out this year alone. In A Cowboy Christmas Romance (Lifetime), a big-city real estate agent returns to her hometown, a picturesque ranch community in Arizona and meets, you guessed it, a cowboy. In Reporting for Christmas (Hulu), a Chicago journalist is sent to Brunswick, Iowa (a town which we learn less than five minutes into the film has a population of 1,000 — so quaint!) and falls for a blandly handsome toymaker. The plots feel almost like a game of Mad Libs: Ambitious [white-collar professional] visits [flyover state] for Christmas and meets a good-looking [blue-collar worker/small business owner] and discovers the true meaning of [love/holidays/family].
What’s driving the popularity of these paint-by-numbers rom-coms? And does this vision of romance reveal anything about women, modern love, or society at large?
Media scholars have argued that although the genre has historically been dismissed as frivolous fare, romance films have always captured important aspects of women’s inner lives and their changing roles in society. In the 80s and 90s, as the proportion of women surged in the workforce — and as they married later and put off having children — the themes of these films began to shift, says Michele Schreiber, Ph.D., a professor at Emory University studying representations of gender in media.
At the height of the genre 40-ish years ago, the protagonists in these movies all seem to have enviable careers and expansive wardrobes full of lush, thick-knit sweaters, a la Meg Ryan, whose When Harry Met Sally looks are still being fetishized today. They have rich social lives, impeccable interior design sense, and kitchens that are also still coveted today — yet they can’t seem to figure out the whole love-and-marriage thing. “They have these aspirational lifestyles,” Dr. Schreiber says, “but at least in these movies, that goes hand-in-hand with romantic frustration.”
The central conflict of these films is the struggle to “have it all,” so to speak. One resolution, presented in movies like Sweet Home Alabama, is to go back home, where life is supposedly slower and the men supposedly more chivalrous.
What’s interesting about this premise is that it flies in the face of what we think of as the fairytale romance, which at its core, is about “marrying up.” Think of Cinderella or Pride and Prejudice: These are classic tales about women vaulting into a higher social class through marriage. The act of searching for a husband who’s better educated than you and has more money is so commonplace that there’s a sociological term for it, “hypergamy.”
But over the past few decades, women have not only closed the gender gap in college completion, they’ve now overtaken men. According to the 2021 census, the number of women with degrees
Which means that it’s becoming harder and harder for straight women to make a hypergamous match, demographers say. Could that be why there’s so much interest in these romantic couplings between professionally successful women and substantially less successful men?
“Some film scholars have made the case that these films were trying to encourage women to scale back their expectations as a way of dealing with these demographic changes,” says Andrea Braithwaite, Ph.D., a professor at Ontario Tech University, who writes about gender and pop culture.
This trope also touches on another phenomenon: the population drain affecting big cities. People are leaving New York, Chicago, and San Francisco at particularly high rates, partly because of the astronomical cost of living. These happen to be the same metros (along with Los Angeles) that these Hallmark heroines are fleeing. And I’ll admit that as a millennial in Brooklyn living in a one-bedroom “garden apartment” with no access to a garden and no windows in my bedroom, watching these women reinvent themselves in these lovely, snow-covered cottages is a little mesmerizing.
Now, I would never actually pick up and move to a tiny town in Vermont, no matter how many blandly handsome bachelors it may have. But the sense of fantasy these movies provide is what makes them so compelling, says Mimi White, a media professor at Northwestern University writing a book on Hallmark movies.
“They’re pure escape,” she tells us. “You see these people living these grueling lives and they find a way to change it. That’s a great fantasy.”
There’s also an economic incentive to setting a film in a small community, says Russell Hainline, a screenwriter with two Hallmark movies under his belt, including 2023’s The Santa Summit. “Hallmark, like any other studio, definitely has relationships with certain cities that make it advantageous to shoot there,” he says. (There’s Burnaby, British Columbia, which stands in for Evergreen, Vermont in Hallmark’s Christmas for Evergreen franchise; Squamish, British Columbia, a sweet little town that’s been featured in 2016’s Christmas Cookies and is featured in Virgin River; and Chester, Vermont, which became “Santaville” in Moonlight & Mistletoe.) And from a storytelling perspective, there are certain elements that viewers expect to see in this genre that might be harder to pull off in, say, Los Angeles. “The quaint town with the Christmas lights and the tree on Main Street are all things that people want to see in this particular brand of fantasy,” Hainline says.
In recent years, though, Hallmark and other networks have started to branch out: Their casts are becoming more diverse, they’re featuring queer relationships, and showcasing different religious backgrounds. But I don’t think that means we’ll be seeing any less of this “woman leaves big city for fulfillment and a man wearing flannel” trope any time soon. A recent study found that a significant portion of Christmas movie fans actually enjoy the predictability of these films. And I get it: Love is hard, work is hard, juggling the two is very hard — and there’s a comfort in watching a woman in that same predicament, knowing that after 90-ish minutes she’ll triumph.
Dr. Braithwaite concludes, “There’s a certain pleasure in a formula where everything works out.”
