In the final days before Christmas, as London softened into that peculiar hush that arrives once schools have begun to let out and families retreat inward to the warmth of the home, I found myself doing something thoroughly predictable and deeply comforting: watching Hallmark Christmas films under my Snuggie. Between farewell dinners with friends, long walks through streets still glowing with festive unrestraint, and the gentle anxiety of packing up a life temporarily for an extended stay in the United States, these films offered a reliable background hum. (You can read a longer and older reflection on Christmas nostalgia in my family and the birth of the family Christmas elf here.)
I’m preparing to fly to the US for a long Christmas break with time with family, slower mornings, the recalibration that comes from a geographical and cultural shift. London has been generous this year: beautiful gatherings, thoughtful conversations, laughter that lingered longer than expected. Leaving it, even temporarily, has sharpened my awareness of transition. And it is in moments like this—between places, identities, rhythms—that the Hallmark Christmas universe reveals itself not as kitsch alone, but as a persistent cultural fantasy about the nature of self-invention and moving between ‘city’ and ‘home’ at the Yuletide season.
Almost without exception, these films follow a familiar arc. A protagonist (usually overworked, professionally successful, emotionally disconnected) is pulled back to a small town—often reluctantly—where their old patterns begin to slip away. There is a bakery to save, a family tradition to restore, a local festival under threat. Somewhere along the way, ambition is softened, productivity is re-evaluated, and a new version of the self is chosen.
Because beneath the snow-dusted town squares and improbably attractive small business owners, Hallmark Christmas films aren’t just about romance; they are the American Dream writ large, specifically, the dream in its form as a renewable project of becoming.
The American Dream, as it appears in Hallmark films, isn’t about upward mobility in the sociological sense. It is about re-choosing oneself. Reinventing the self in alignment with values that feel more authentic, more humane, and more emotionally intelligent. The dream isn’t that you can become rich or even necessarily that you can become anything you want, but that you can become truer.
And this idea has deep roots. One can trace it back to Emerson’s insistence on self-reliance, to William James’s pragmatism, to the therapeutic turn of twentieth-century American culture that Philip Rieff so famously diagnosed. But Hallmark offers a softened, seasonal version of this lineage: a therapeutic narrative wrapped in garlands and goodwill.
The protagonists are rarely impoverished or desperate. They are comfortable but misaligned. Their problem isn’t survival; it is meaning. And meaning, in this universe, is restored not through critique or struggle, but through return. Home. Community. A slower tempo. A person who sees you. Who really sees you.
This is why these films often resonate more deeply during this time of year. Watching them while packing to cross the Atlantic, I noticed how insistently they rehearse the fantasy that identity can be paused, revised, and resumed elsewhere. That you can step out of one life and into another without too much residue. That airports are not thresholds of loss, but portals of possibility.
Of course, this is where the fantasy reveals its limits.
The Hallmark town is a place without structural conflict. There is no precarity that cannot be solved by collective goodwill, no inequality that demands reckoning, no historical weight that resists the redemptive arc. In this sense, the films function as what Lauren Berlant might call “cruel optimism”, attachments to images of the good life that soothe even as they obscure.
And yet.
It would be too easy—and perhaps too academic—to dismiss these films as ideological anaesthetic. What interests me more than just their popularity is their persistence and their quiet emotional efficacy, because they continue to speak to something real: a widespread longing for lives that feel coherent, relational, and narratable.
In my recent work—particularly in my ongoing thinking about pedagogy, spiritual self-formation, and the ethics of transformation—I’ve become increasingly attentive to the stories we use to make change imaginable. Hallmark films offer a highly accessible script for transformation: leave the wrong life, return to the right one, and allow love to confirm the choice.
This is not how life works. But it is how many people wish it could work, especially at the turn of the year.
There is something revealing about the timing of these films. They flood the cultural field precisely when people are already taking stock of relationships, work, priorities, failures, and hopes. They offer not instruction, but reassurance: you are not too late; you are allowed to begin again; reinvention can bring you closer to your real ‘Self’.
Having lived long enough outside the US to see these films from an oblique angle (and I say that as someone who grew up in a small, cosy Midwestern town that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark film), I’m struck by how distinctively American this vision of self-invention remains. European narratives of change tend to emphasise accommodation, inheritance, and negotiation with limits. The American story still leans toward reinvention as both a moral right and an ethical imperative.
Hallmark Christmas films distil that impulse into its gentlest form.
They are not about conquest or domination, but about choosing differently. About saying no to a life that looks successful but feels thin. About rediscovering craft, community, and care. About allowing relational life to matter again.
And this is where, perhaps unexpectedly, they intersect with my work in coaching and contemplative practice. One of the most common experiences people bring into one-to-one sessions is not crisis, but quiet misalignment. A sense that life is working externally while drifting internally. That something has been gained at the expense of something unnamed. The fantasy that a single decision—a move, a relationship, a new project—might re-knit the whole.
Hallmark films indulge that fantasy fully. Real life does not. But it does allow for smaller, truer acts of re-alignment.
This is why I continue to return, both in writing and in practice, to frameworks that slow transformation down rather than accelerate it. Quarterly reflection instead of dramatic reinvention. Gentle integrative practices rather than total overhaul. Attention to parts, patterns, and pacing.
As the year turns, I’m offering two spaces that are explicitly designed to work with this threshold moment—not to promise reinvention, but to support intentional re-orientation.
On 5 January, I’ll be hosting Reflect & Reset: a Quarterly Planning Workshop, a 90-minute session designed to help you review where you are, clarify what matters now, and set direction without force. It’s not about hustle or optimisation, but about coherence—internal and external. You can register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311948616
And on 12 January, I’ll be offering an Integrative Meditation session, an hour to settle the nervous system, reconnect with embodied awareness, and begin the year from a place of presence rather than pressure. Details and registration here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311944273
Both are intentionally modest in scale. No promises of transformation by Valentine’s Day. Just spaces to listen more carefully to what is already asking for attention.
If Hallmark Christmas films remind us of anything worth keeping, it is this: people change not because they are broken, but because something in them wants to live more honestly. The danger lies not in the desire for reinvention, but in the belief that it must be instantaneous, total, or externally validated.
As I finish packing, folding one life neatly enough to place it temporarily in storage, I feel grateful for the quieter truths these films gesture toward even as they simplify them. That rhythm matters. That community shapes us. That work is not the same as worth. That it is permissible—necessary, even—to pause and ask whether the life we are living still fits.
The American Dream, in its most humane form, is not about becoming exceptional. It is about becoming aligned. And alignment, unlike fantasy, is something we can practice—slowly, relationally, and with care.
If you’re standing at a threshold of your own—new year, new season, new questions—you’re very welcome to reach out. I have limited availability for 1-1 coaching opening up in the new year, and I’m always glad to explore whether the work might be supportive for where you are now.
For now, though, I’ll finish the last of the packing, queue up another improbably snowy town, and let the fantasy do what it does best: remind me that change is allowed to be gentle.
Upcoming Events
Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop
- 5 January | 7.30-9.00 PM GMT | £10
- Register here: https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311948616
Integrative Meditation
- 12 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4
- Register here: https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311944273
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