Jul 17, 2020 4 min read

It’s Christmas in July! Slice up the fruitcake and let’s watch a dumb movie.

Right around the time all the sniping started about wearing masks, I’d had it up to here with the pandemic, so I turned off the news and went looking for something soothing to watch. On that day, TCM was showing old detective films, which were too dark, and so I kept clicking around and landed on the QVC shopping channel.

They were selling Christmas decorations – big light-up Santas to put on your front porch. It didn’t take long to realize that July is about halfway to December, so why not throw a little holiday cheer into the gloom? Cheery TV pitches about reindeer-themed blankets are just the thing to put you in the mood when it’s 91 degrees outside.

Clicking on down the channels, I landed on Hallmark. They, too, are celebrating the whole Santa thing, with romance movies 24/7. As I’ve outlined on this page in the past, all the movies follow the same plot: career-driven girl from the big city finds herself back in her quaint hometown for the holiday; she is unhappily stranded there by a blizzard or by the illness of a grandparent who calls on her to rescue the coffee shop or by the urge to suddenly open a bridal boutique. Often, she’s a talented tree-trimmer who must save the town’s tree-lighting event.

The career girl is engaged to a handsome Wall Street man back in the big city. Meanwhile, lurking in plot is the rugged handyman, carpenter, chef or tree-delivery man who never left his hometown and, oh, boy, does he have eyes for that career girl and her shiny blonde hair. Reliably, the two will meet when they smash into each other on the sidewalk; she spills her coffee on his plaid barn jacket and he doesn’t seem to mind, and that’s enough to start a twinkly Christmas romance.

I watched a half dozen of these films this past week – enough of them to notice even more patterns. These films are where the former leading men of TV and film go at the end of their careers. People like Tom Arnold and Gregory Harrison and that guy from “Home Improvement,” Richard Karn, are now the loving, often-widowed and facially hairy dads of the career girl. They only get to say lines such as, “It’s not Christmas without you home, honey,” and “You have to follow your heart.” A friend pointed out that Ed Asner tends to pop up in red suits in these movies, too. And if you want to feel old, check out the women who are cast as grandmothers. Remember Donna Mills, the hot blonde who played Abby on “Knot’s Landing”? She’s Nana now (and doesn’t look like any grandmother I’ve ever known).

Something else I noticed: Although these are romance movies, they are devoid of all sexual energy or chemistry. There’s only one kiss per movie, and by the time it happens in the final scene, you’re convinced these two lovebirds have not nor will they ever be naked together. (Also not believable was the scene in which the heroine cuts and actually serves fruitcake to her dinner guests.)

Hallmark hopes to roll about 40 more new movies for the actual Christmas season. I didn’t know there were that many reasons for a city girl to get stranded in her hometown, but bring on the movies and the fruitcake. If this pandemic isn’t over by then, I’ll be looking for something soft and mindless to watch in December.