Flood the holiday with cheer, right? That appears to be the case since between the regular cable channels and streaming channels the market for Christmas movies has opened wide and the floodgates have been flung open to admit the veritable landslide of sappy, comedic, and sometimes horrific and cringe-worthy holiday movies that are so prevalent this time of year. We’ve gotten past Halloween and we’re still here, obviously, enough people are still left after what was shaping up to be a tumultuous Thanksgiving, and now it’s time to overwhelm our senses with Christmas movies in a continual stream of holiday cheer that’s bound to keep us up to our ear canals in Christmas music and make some of us yearn for the good old days when we only had a handful of movies to pick from since our knowledge of various cable channels wasn’t this great and streaming would have been something that might require an actual stream. But those days are long gone since people want more and more variety when it comes to what they want to watch and as a result, the various networks have answered. Hands up, who’s going to be watching the same old Christmas movies that you watched as a kid, an adolescent, and then as an adult due to tradition? Anyone?
There are a lot of us that will still be looking forward to such lines as “Fra-gee-lay. It must be Italian.” or “You’ll shoot your eye out kid!” and quite possibly “Hallelujah, holy s***! Where’s the Tylenol?”, since those are some of the best lines that exemplify the Christmas spirit when it comes to the movies. Then there will be those that go in for the sappy stories that are also classics since they bring us back down to earth and remind us that the holiday season is for giving, for loving, and for being with loved ones whenever possible. The pandemic might actually take a part of that away since as folks likely remember over Thanksgiving we were being told to stay home and not visit loved ones, which is an argument I won’t get into at the moment. But back to the flood of holiday movies coming in this year, and why this sounds insane but is actually becoming kind of common. Right now entertainment is kind of in a funky state since we can’t go out to the movies, it’s advised to even stop going out to see other people in some ways, and as a result, our entertainment options aren’t entirely limited but the need to get the entertainment to people is still apparent. That’s likely not the biggest reason why so many holiday movies are coming out, but it’s something to think about.
With so many holiday movies coming though it feels more than a little overwhelming since there’s one month in which people really enjoy watching those movies that are Christmas-themed and after that, it gets a bit awkward to keep watching them. It’s kind of like someone trying to set up a party after a big bash the night before, people are tired and hungover and don’t really want to summon up the energy to do it all again. Some folks might, just like some people might relish the fact that so many holiday movies are coming out and might still be watching them in January. But a lot of folks might look at the list of Christmas movies and wonder how in the hell anyone can possibly watch all of them and not see the similarities that take place among every single movie at some point. Unless there’s a difference in the genre, such as horror or comedy, there are A LOT of similarities between some movies that are hard to miss. When it becomes possible to see the way the plot is laid out before the movie even gets to a certain part it becomes a little pointless to keep watching since one can guess what’s going to happen and a large percent of the time they’re going to be right. At that point it’s no longer a matter of having experienced these kinds of stories for so long, it’s that the people telling the stories have grown just lazy enough to keep following the same formulas without deviating.
Hallmark is one of those channels that tend to churn out the same type of story over and over no matter if they use one template or another. People love it because it’s comfortable, it’s routine, and it keeps them happy. There’s nothing wrong with that really, especially now that a lot of people actually need the comforting and can take solace in the idea that some things don’t change as quickly as others. But for those that want more story and something different, quantity doesn’t usually beat out quality.
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