It’s November in Chicago.  It’s November, but there are days it feels like it might as well be February.  There’s a damp chill in the air, mornings are dark, and the sun dips below the gray horizon long before I’ve parked and clanked up the stairs to my condo.  There is one, definitive, and irrefutable sign that it is not, in fact, February, and that is the omnipresence of the Hallmark Christmas movie.

Over the past several years, I have engaged in a tumultuous, long-term affair with Hallmark Christmas movies.  I used to adore them.  I simply couldn’t get enough of the slick, candy-coated stories of young women finding big love under impossible circumstances.  In a Hallmark Christmas movie, anything is possible, even as their plots are benignly predictable.  An unemployed waitress lives in a sprawling apartment that just happens to be next door to a handsome doctor looking for love.  He sees past her gruff attitude and seemingly inexplicable hatred of all things Christmas and inspires her to love the holidays – and him.  Another woman kindles a relationship with the most vulnerable of her students only to discover that the doe-eyed child’s handsome widower father is looking for love, and he finds it in her.  The camera pans out as they kiss under a gazebo beneath a sea of white twinkle lights and freshly falling fake snow.

These women always live in sleepy no-name towns in anywhere America.  The paper towns they inhabit allow viewers to see themselves in the saccharine, innocuous storylines, and for a long time, I did just that.  I used to joke that I needed a “starter boyfriend.”  In so many Hallmark Christmas movies, the heroine is dating a total jerk who is totally wrong for her, but she doesn’t see it.  He’s usually a workaholic excelling in a vaguely important profession.  He is rude to waitstaff and pedantic and condescending in his conversations with his sweet, smart girlfriend who just loves Christmas. Even though he is a total ass, she blithely ignores his behavior and puts up a Christmas tree in his cold, sterile apartment where he refuses to kiss her underneath the mistletoe she has meticulously hung in his entryway.  This starter boyfriend often leaves on a “very important,” but poorly defined business trip, leaving said sweet, smart, Christmas-loving girlfriend to fall hopelessly in love with the tall, dark, handsome stranger who wears flannel, chops his own wood, and has just come back into town to help his ailing grandfather celebrate the holidays.  Starter boyfriend gets snowed in at some far away airport, fails to call his sweet, smart girlfriend, and she spends the holiday with tall-dark-and-handsome and his silver fox of a grandfather. 

I used to cozy up under a blanket and watch movie after movie – imagining that during Christmastime, anything is possible.  Perhaps I could hire an unemployed actor to play my fiancé at family Thanksgiving, and by Christmas, we would be blissfully in love.  Or maybe I could wander downtown and bump into a handsome stranger at the ice-skating ribbon in Millennium Park.  Our gazes would meet, he would flash an impossibly white smile, and his eyes would positively twinkle with the magic of Christmas.  We would warm our hands around mugs of hot chocolate at the Kris Kindle Market in Daly Plaza, sip champagne cocktails in the Walnut Room at Macy’s on State, and by New Year’s Eve, we’d have written our own Hallmark love story.

As each and every one of those Hallmark movies ended in magical Christmas love, I began to feel like I had ingested too many sugarplums.  The very predictability that I craved in consuming love story after love story had me feeling oddly powerless in my own romantic life.  “Love doesn’t happen like that,” I would think.  “Life doesn’t happen like that.”  I couldn’t just step out my door and count on the spirit of the season to beam love into my life. 

But you see, I’ve learned in the last five months that there is far more truth in Hallmark Christmas movies than I ever imagined.  If we were to boil our own crazy life adventures and our improbable love stories down to their most fundamental elements – we would have the basic plot points of a Hallmark movie.  The wine nights with good friends who give great advice, the missed connection that led us to our first date with our future husband, the flat tire that reminded us that there is good in the world.  Our lives are full of magical moments – and our next meet-cute is right around the corner.  We just have to believe it’s there.  Just when I start to think it’s not, I’m going to square my shoulders, smile, and talk to a stranger.

 

Until next time…