All I Want for Christmas Is a Cowboy<\/a>,” sung by Megan Morony.<\/p>\nGive me tall, hot, in a Stetson\nIs my frozen heart finally thawing? Is Hallmark working its holiday magic on me or is the pressure of my impending deadline and my hosting duties making me descend into delirium?<\/p>\n
DAY TWENTY-TWO<\/strong><\/h2>\nMy home still smells.<\/p>\n
No matter, I must forge forward. My next two watches, The Christmas Cup <\/em><\/strong>and Christmas at the Catnip Caf\u00e9<\/em><\/strong>, probe the familiar question of work-life balance for two very different women (a U.S. Marine who coaches her neighbors for a Christmas tournament, and a marketing executive who inherits a cat cafe). Will Staff Sgt. Kelly Brandt (Rhiannon Fish) move to Hawaii and take a military contracting job or remain in town with local fireman Quinn Stokley? Will Olivia fly back into her dream apartment in Oakland or stay in Upstate New York to sell coffee and\/or cats? (“I don’t have any space in my life for a cafe,” Olivia argues, “let alone one that’s centered around animals!”)<\/p>\n\n\nPaul Campbell and Erin Cahill in Christmas at the Catnip Caf\u00e9. <\/em>(Hallmark Media)<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThis common Hallmark plot point is a widely noted flaw. The stories (almost) always end with the woman sacrificing her career for the sake of a man. Beyond the gender politics, this just gives me horrible economic anxiety. In today\u2019s market it has been painful to keep watching characters turn down job offer after job offer. It’s so common that when Sgt. Brandt from The Christmas Cup<\/em> gives up a contracting job in Hawaii to stay with her new boyfriend I actually found myself rooting for her to go to war (sorry, Sgt. Brandt).<\/p>\nDAY TWENTY-FOUR<\/strong><\/h2>\nHallmark has at least one movie where the woman keeps her job. Unfortunately it’s literally a fantasy. She’s Making a List<\/em> stars Lacey Chabert (the John Cena of Hallmark) as an employee of the Naughty or Nice Group, a firm that evaluates children’s behavior and determines if they’ve been bad or good for Santa. On purely thematic grounds, this late addition is my favorite Hallmark Christmas movie. The story allows for some shockingly nuanced explorations of ethics (is there an objective “naughty” and “nice?”), rehabilitation and even artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\nChablet is horrified when her boss introduces a “super-algorithm” that uses “data from all the children in the world” that detects naughtiness “without any human beings at all.” It’s heady stuff for the network, likely from a screenwriter who knows the Hallmark movie will be the first casualty if the studios start delegating features to AI. I guess I\u2019ll find out next year.<\/p>\n
And now, my mission has come to an end. I’ve withstood the full assault of Hallmark’s Christmas blitzkrieg. I have crossed the River Peppermint Styx. I have seen what lies in the hearths of darkness. I\u2019m exhausted, and I haven\u2019t even mentioned The Snow Must Go On<\/em>, Holiday Touchdown: A Bill\u2019s Love Story, <\/em>or Hallmark\u2019s Hanukkah rom-com, Oy to the World! <\/em>But at least my sink has been fixed.<\/p>\nWhat I discovered was both less and more than I expected. Hallmark movies, while not as bad as critics might condemn, don\u2019t contain the hidden depths or deep romantic holiday truths I had hoped to discover. Even fans often admit the movies\u2019 appeal includes their \u201cpredictability,\u201d their \u201ccoziness,\u201d and how they allow you to \u201cturn your brain off.\u201d Those same fans, I\u2019d wager, will have trouble years from now singling the films out. But is this a bug or a feature? Hallmark\u2019s infamous, rom-commodified idea<\/em> of Christmas is already more famous than any of the network\u2019s individual movies \u2014 not to mention most mainstream films, full stop. The network\u2019s cliches could outlast us all, living on through the memories of meet-cutes and small towns. It\u2019s a level of Christmas marketing that puts Hallmark in the same echelon as the Roman Empire. Or the apostles. Or Mariah Carey.<\/p>\nAnd what of me? Did nightly visits from Hallmark warm this Scrooge\u2019s holiday heart? It was a challenge. Looming over this whole affair is the fact that I was born the day after Christmas and have complicated emotions about the season. As a kid, it was tough for my birthday to literally follow the Son of God\u2019s, while today my holidays are forever intermingled with the existential delight of aging. Christmas is stressful for everyone, but dreading it is my literal birthright.<\/p>\n
This year, however, I was so preoccupied with cataloging Hallmark\u2019s holiday stories that the actual holiday has flown by, leading me to the eve of my own unorthodox Christmas with a brain full of basic cable fairy tales. Not exactly Christmas magic, but a kind of dark magic of the movies. I couldn\u2019t have asked for a better gift.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration: Glenn Harvey for Yahoo News Christmas comes but once a year \u2014 unless you are an avid watcher of the Hallmark Channel during the holidays. Then it comes two weeks before Halloween and lasts 70 nights, leading right up to the end of a very long December. Granted, I am not usually an avid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2208952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[22116,345048,344153],"class_list":["post-2208951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-christmas","tag-hallmark-media","tag-the-hallmark-channel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/What-one-single-man-learned-about-the-holidays-romance-and-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2208953,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208951\/revisions\/2208953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2208952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}