In the 2022 Hallmark Christmas movie, A Kismet Christmas, a famous author begrudgingly returns to her hometown after her publisher picks it for a promotional event. The author hopes to avoid her crush from her awkward teen years but immediately runs into him.
Like all of Hallmark's holiday offerings, the movie follows a fairly predictable storyline leading to a happy ending. Along the way, characters engage in holiday rituals like decorating the tree, making Christmas cookies and sipping hot chocolate.
This predictability has proven to be both highly pleasurable and profitable. Sixty percent of American households tune into a Christmas movie during the holiday season, and the leading producer of Christmas movies, Hallmark Channel, boasted 85 million viewers in 2021.
The films might be formulaic, but the reasons why they are beloved are more complex. Only recently have social scientists begun trying to understand this genre, and they are finding ...
