Hallmark Channel a safe haven in troubled world

Happy, schmaltzy Hallmark holiday movies, in today’s troubled world, can be a mental escape from reality. After approximately 90 minutes, the movie is over, take a break, and then turn on another one.

Compared to watching the news/opinion shows these days, your peace of mind will thank you if you turn to Hallmark, which is still a family owned company by the way.

Founded in 1910 by J.C. Hall (Joyce Clyde Hall) in Kansas City, Mo., the business started out selling picture postcards from two shoeboxes, evolving from the “Hall Brothers” business and officially adopting the “Hallmark” name in 1928. Today, two grandsons of the founder still run the company, which includes Hallmark Media.

Whether you’re streaming or still tied to cable, Hallmark offers Christmas movies as a staple of the holiday season. As of December 2025, the network has a vast library of over 300 holiday titles, ranging from timeless classics to new 2025 releases.

The movies all follow the same basic script: A man and woman meet, usually in their 30s.

They usually, but not always, start out disliking one another.

Some twist of fate draws them closer together until they discover they’re falling in love.

Sometimes one of them is already involved in a relationship with someone who clearly isn’t “right” for them, so there is the breakup scene needed before the two protagonists can finally admit their love for one another.

Usually toward the end of the movie, just when everything seems perfect, there is some big misunderstanding that splits them up. One never wants to see the other.

“This isn’t working out.”

As a viewer, this may cause you about 10 minutes of sadness, unless you’ve gotten to the point where you already know how every Hallmark holiday movie ends – happy, not sad.

Something almost magical suddenly intervenes, clears the air, chases away the misunderstanding, and the two future spouses, always meant to be, end up together in the end, where they’re destined to live happily ever after.

What is amazing are the Hallmark writers who manage to take the same basic template and tweak it so many times into something new. In the case of Hallmark Media, that amounts to more than 300 Christmas movies.

Thing is, with most of them, even an atheist could watch them and not be distracted.

The point of most of these movies doesn’t involve any religious tradition, although a very few do, provided you don’t count the singing of traditional Christmas songs.

Rather, they center on family holiday traditions, the importance of family, good friends, kind strangers, and the simple lesson – no matter how bad things may look, it doesn’t mean they can’t get better.

That is a trademark of humanity, not any one religious tradition.

In today’s troubled, divided country, Hallmark offers an escape into a world full of happy endings, good tidings, where the “good” always defeats the “bad.

Merry Christmas.