Illustration: Chelsea Beck
At some point in recent history, Christmas was mostly about watching people on the news beat each other up on Black Friday in their bloodthirsty quest for the latest singing, dancing, pissing, shitting Elmo doll. Thankfully, that has been shelved in service of a Christmas tradition that is much more American: Gluing your ass to the couch and mass-consuming thousands of Christmas movies on cable television.
Lifetime has long peddled its churn of made-for-TV movies, popularizing an entire genre of ripped-from-the-headlines crime thrillers like The Nanny Killer and I Almost Married a Serial Killer. As TiVo’s revolutionary digital recording technology gained popularity in the aughts, the quantity of these films seemed to increase. No longer were viewers tied down by strict airing schedules or the number of VCR tapes you could fit on a shelf. Cable channels like Lifetime, in turn, found themselves in a new age of viewership. Combined with the growing cash-grabbiness of American Christmastime, made-for-TV holiday schedules became a recurring format.
In 2005, Lifetime released two original Christmas movies—Deck the Halls and Recipe for a Perfect Christmas. After that, they maintained a steady rate of two to three original Christmas movies a year until 2012, when they released 12 original Christmas and holiday-themed movies. The network’s competitor, Hallmark Channel—which is Lifetime, if Lifetime was more concerned with peddling a wholesome, conservative, vaguely Christian outlook on the holiday—kept a similar pace.
As Christmas movies become more ubiquitous, so too does the frequency with which they pierce the mainstream media. Especially where they concern streaming services like Netflix, whose 2017 film A Christmas Prince has already seen two sequels. Perhaps the accessibility of Netflix over pay-cable channels is partially to blame, and the fact that all three Christmas Prince movies have been covered relentlessly by overly-online bloggers and Twitter users. Similarly, Netflix’s The Princess Switch, starring Vanessa Hudgens, created a social media firestorm for its inane plot and bonkers setting. (Its sequel, due sometime next year, is rumored to feature a third Vanessa Hudgens.)
Meanwhile, cable networks continue to beef up their schedules with more and more original holiday movies, even creating programming events to wrest some order from the seasonal chaos, creating their own entire pocket holiday cinematic universes, each with their own subtle character. Hallmark has turned its massive “Countdown to Christmas” into a parade of brands looking to cash in on the Christmas audience, with major sponsors this year, including McCormick cooking supplies, the 2019 Chrysler Pacifica, and Cost Plus World Market. They’ve even begun selling Christmas-themed romance novels and merchandise based on their movies, like this “Wine & Hallmark Movies” wine glass. Lifetime, too, runs its annual “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime” event (which has seen various names) 24/7, from the last week in November through the end of the year. Considering the number of hours in a day and average runtime of an hour-and-a-half, that’s about 16 movies per day and over 500 movies in total. That’s a lot of fucking Christmas!
I honestly didn’t know what my goal was when I started this journey. Was I searching for the meaning of Christmas, to warm my heart as hell freezes over and the world ends around me? Perhaps I wanted to understand my own predilection for movies about women who quit their day jobs to move back to their small South Dakota hometowns, where they fall in love with the hardware store owner’s son, only to have their romantic fling foiled by the fiancé who surprises her while on business for his finance job to purchase the hardware store and turn it into a chain restaurant. (I’d say it was mostly the latter!)
This year, with almost 100 original Christmas movies premiering on various cable and streaming platforms, I had a thought. What if I meticulously summarized, tagged, sorted, and parsed every single one of these movies in an effort to better understand this rapidly emerging cinematic field? The data I found in my investigation was shocking and often absurd.
To process this absolutely mind-boggling amount of information, I created a system of tagging the Christmas movies by subject and theme, based on summaries and trailers provided by various streaming services, channels, and information gathered from other outlets. (Like Good Housekeeping, whose master lists of movies were immensely useful.)
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