With Halloween behind us and that one Mariah Carey song ready to be played from every single speaker within earshot for the next month we know it’s nearly Christmas.
Christmas has a very specific place in pop culture especially for movies. Most Christmas films usually around someone going through mischief and hijinks to learn a valuable lesson about family and the true meaning of the holidays … unless you’re a successful woman then it will ruin your life.
Now this is quite specific that if you’re main character is a successful woman her life as she knew it is over. If your main character is woman but with an okay life she’ll end up with a new boyfriend and a nice Christmas dinner but not if she’s successful.
This woman will walk away from a career that she’s really great in, abandon her rich family, ditch the rich guy she was engaged to (WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS ENGAGED) all to settle down with the white widower single father who was nice to her over a holiday weekend.
As a trope this is bloody well weird.
The bit that always gets me is that at the beginning of the each of these movies our protagonist is happy with their rich fiancée, I mean for gods sake their engaged for a reason but the story will always find a reason just to separate them.
He/she/or both have an important business thing.
He/she/or both just don’t really like Christmas.
They have a fight that somehow shows the true colours of them both showing them that they are incompatible but somehow shows her that yeah, she should go and immediately profess her love for the aforementioned white widower single father.
Also why is it that the love interest is always a white widower single father…WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR WIVES…ok it’s usually cancer but still there is an epidemic in the Midwest of America just wiping out women. Also, whose to say the dead wife was not a successful woman…who’s to say she was the first wife?
Is the Hallmark channel just aiming towards stroking a really specific kink or do people really like seeing this same story told over and over… and over… and over again?
I say to hell with that
I want to see a Christmas movie in which Christmas doesn’t win and the single white widower father doesn’t get to claim their next victim. I want to see one of those movies end with our successful female protagonist blowing Christmas off to go jet skiing with the rich fiancée because isn’t that what Christmas is really about?
Selfishly getting what you want.