MollyMonahan

It’s that time of the year again. Time for snuggling up by the fire with a rich hot chocolate, pressing your face against the cold car door window to catch a glimpse of a soon-to-be deflated Santa Claus and never being able to escape the happiness of other people beaming with love. Ah yes, the holidays are a perfect time for not only couples around us, but also movies, to rub their relationships in our noses in a cheesy and not at all unrealistic way. Although I would consider myself a hopeless romantic, with a combination of the acting, false pretenses and cringeworthy moments, Christmas Hallmark movies do not satisfy my romantic sweet tooth. 

The girl hates or loses faith in Christmas, but the boy, usually starting off in the movie as the annoying, yet charming, antagonist loves the holidays and tries to restore her spirit. Despite all Hallmark has done to try to switch their basic and overused plot line up, it all ends the same. The guy ends up with the girl. Many of us know that is not always the case. And what is so wrong about that? The guy and the girl do not always have their happy ever after, not all dreams come true and Christmas is not always magical. 

Hallmark movies cause a dissolution that everyone who is not romantically involved with someone on Christmas is lonely. The reality of the Christmas season for a high school student means spending all the money in your bank account on family gift exchanges and random coworker white elephants. Also, with December comes finals, also known as the absolute worst time to be a student. Oftentimes I am so wrapped up in school, jobs and finding an outfit for Christmas that will be approved by both my mother and grandma, that being “lonely” and not in a relationship on Christmas is the last thing on my mind. 

As hopeful teenage girls snuggle up and sit on their couches to watch movies on repeat on the Hallmark channel, more than a chance of physical movements for the day is going out the door, reality does too. Hallmark movies are notorious for planting that idea of a “perfect boy” in the heads of young impressionable heads. You don’t have your perfect guy fixated in your head? That boy who will first take interest in you, bug you in a Ryan Gosling hanging on a Ferris Wheel type of way, then will be so perfect for you that you can’t get him out of your head? Yeah, me neither. 

Allow me to save you some time. Every Hallmark movie has these basic plot lines. A girl is struggling with being at an average, depressing job because she is extremely passionate about something that wouldn’t pay her bills. Or maybe she is with a guy that is completely wrong for her, and not at all ironically, she has already met her perfect guy, perhaps her best friend or a stranger met in the first act of the movie. Possibly her mother is pressuring her to marry rich, but she has already fallen in love with someone else. Or maybe, in simple Christmas fashion, she has lost the magic and hope in Christmas and is in desperate need of a boy to put the Christmas twinkle back in her eyes.