Audio transcript

Lightly edited for clarity 

INTRO: The holiday season is full of traditions we can’t help but love: sledding, sipping hot cocoa by the fire, and, of course, binge-watching those delightfully predictable holiday TV movies. You know the ones – a big-city, single woman heads to a charming small town, crosses paths with a rugged local, discovers the true meaning of the season, saves the day and falls head over heels in love. 

But for film and media researcher Kit Hughes, there’s one character in these cheery tales who often steals the spotlight: the scrappy small business owner. Whether they’re front-and-center or in the background, this character represents more than just a feel-good holiday trope. After diving deep into the formula behind Hallmark’s vast catalog of holiday movies, Hughes uncovered how these films go beyond heartwarming romances to explore big ideas about economics, morality, who gets to be the hero, and who is the villain. 

I recently sat down with the Colorado State University associate professor to learn how these sappy classics tell a deeper story. Spoiler alert: Beneath all the holiday cheer (and cheese), these predictable flicks can pack a surprisingly powerful punch. 

HOST: This research began as a way to look at how film and television shape our ideas about the economy and our understanding about things like Wall Street and owning a business. And I have to say, as someone whose entire working knowledge of the stock market comes directly from the movie Trading Places, I feel a little targeted there. So, how did the idea of looking at this through the lens of Hallmark movies come into play? 

HUGHES: First of all, Trading Places is an excellent Christmas film. I also remember coming out of that film as a 10-year-old thinking, now the time is ripe to get into concentrated orange futures. (laughs) A lot of the work that I do looks at films about the economy, but films that are produced by economic institutions like the New York Stock Exchange. In previous work, I’ve looked at how the Stock Exchange creates films for investors to explain what it means to invest and why people should invest. 

Increasingly, I’ve been interested in more popular representations of the economy. In particular, I’ve been really interested in the characters that animate the narratives that we tell over and over again about how the economy works and who it works for. And the character I’ve really been interested in is the small business owner. So, I’ve been watching a lot of Bar Rescue. I’ve been watching a lot of Cheers, Nathan for You, Fixer Upper. Once you start thinking about this character, it really is inescapable. In terms of Hallmark in particular, as I was thinking about the small business owner, I was also, like many Americans, watching Hallmark Christmas films with my family. It’s become part of my holiday tradition, especially over the last five or so years. 

As I was watching these films that have become massively popular, I realized that the small business owner is a hugely important part of what makes them so cozy, so fun to watch. In particular, the thing that I think is interesting is you have this set of films that are ostensibly about the Christmas holidays, a time when people have off to spend with their family to relax after a year of work. And yet at the center of so many of these films are a bunch of people who are working this whole time. So, what is it about small business owner that is so appealing? That question is really what got me into these films. 

HOST: Anyone who’s watched a Hallmark movie, and probably a lot of people who haven’t watched a Hallmark movie, know that there’s a well-worn formula to these films. There’s the fish-out-of-water element – the big city, single woman going to the country or back to her small hometown. There’s a holiday or an annual competition. And there’s that plucky small business owner. It may be a main character; it may be a side character, but it’s always there. What does that character signify in these movies? 

HUGHES: You’re absolutely right. These are very formulaic films to the extent that you can go online and download any number of bingo cards to use as you watch alongside these films. Snowball fight, check. Gingerbread competition, check. Ugly sweater, check. Even Hallmark released its own bingo card recognizing that there is a formula to these films, and that’s where some of the pleasure lies. 

So, thinking about this formula, one of the things that really interests me is as Hallmark continues to make these films year after year, what part of the formula stays the same, and what parts of the formula can change, but still has the cozy Christmas Hallmark movie feel that we’ve come to love. In particular, I was really interested in this question in the early 2020s when Hallmark was undergoing something of a transition. 

There was a scandal in 2019 that broke when the CEO, William Abbott, pulled an ad that featured two women kissing. And then there was this huge backlash. It resulted in his resignation. Hallmark hired a new CEO, Wonya Lucas, and the company publicly committed to improving their LGBTQ representation. Wonya Lucas herself committed to expanding the kinds of storylines in these films. She even said explicitly, I don’t think women need to quit their jobs. I was really interested in when the formula is changing, are there things that must be there that make sure that it’s cozy, that make sure that it’s Christmassy? 

The small business owner is one of those critical keystones of the formula because the small business owner, as it’s used in these films, embodies a very particular fantasy. It’s a fantasy that includes independence and freedom for the small business owner but matches that with a sense of strong family connection and thriving local communities, which the small business owner is also very heavily engaged in and supports. 

HOST: It’s interesting because in your research you reference a Pew Research Center survey that looked at what institutions Americans trust the most. And number one – not by a little, but by a huge majority – were small business owners, even ahead of the military, ahead of churches, ahead of schools. What is it about small business owners that makes them such a powerful symbol in American culture? 

HUGHES: That study, when I first found it, was one of those bits of data that let me know that I was on the right track. I couldn’t believe how much of a gap there was between the small business owner and these other key institutions. In that same study, large corporations rank lowest in terms of the institutions that Americans believe are improving our way of life. 

I think there are a few different things happening here. One, trust in American institutions is historically low. And that’s driven a lot by partisan divides. We have different organizations that have become heavily politicized, and the small business owner hasn’t been politicized in the same way. There are some reasons for that. Within American culture, there is this idea that anyone can be a small business owner. Not only can anyone be a small business owner, maybe everyone should be a small business owner and start their own small business. 

The other thing that I think is at play here is what people think about when they think about the category of small business. If you’re like me, when I think of small business, I’m thinking of, for example, the local pizzeria, where the owners were friends of my parents. Or I’m thinking of the small health food grocery store that my mom managed for a decade. Or I’m thinking of Wolverine here in town, where I like to get my coffee and shop for books. 

These are institutions that are within our own communities where even if we don’t personally know the people who work there or who own these organizations, we might recognize the same people when we go in and grab our coffee or order a beer. They provide real services to our community. People have a sense of the importance of small businesses in their community to local jobs, to a tangible part of the economy. Those are reasons why when people hear small business, they tend to really support it. 

Now, the thing that is complicated here is that there is the idea of the small business that many of us hold in our heads. Let’s say a business that has three or four employees, where the owner is involved in the day-to-day operations and its purpose isn’t necessarily to expand to other states or across the country. There’s that idea, and then there’s the definition of the small business that the Small Business Administration uses. That is the definition that drives a lot of our governmental policy, funding subsidies and that sort of thing. 

If you use that definition, 99.9% of all businesses are classified as small businesses. When we think about this in the context of Hallmark, we can think about how the Small Business Administration would set the limits for the certain kinds of companies that we see over and over again because these are based on industry. For example, a small retail bakery can have 500 employees and be considered a small business. A cookie manufacturer, and you know there are a lot of cookie manufacturers in Hallmark movies; they can have up to 1,250 employees. Certain small businesses can make tens of millions of dollars and still be classified as small. There’s something really interesting here where the cultural idea that we have of the small business might not always match up with the way that the small business is mobilized in our tax policy or legal policy or regulation. 

HOST: Now, as part of your research, you watched 40 Hallmark movies, which, hats off to you. 

HUGHES: Yeah, I did it so you didn’t have to. 

HOST: You watched every single one that was released in the year 2022. What did these movies tell you about how we see the role of the small business owner? 

HUGHES: In these films, I think we can see the role of the small business owner as something that is unique insofar as it resolves very real tensions and desires for folks to balance work and life, to balance individual freedom and connection to community and family. In these films, a lot of times small business owners get to have their cake and eat it too. And oftentimes they’re also making that cake. 

HOST: Something that I always struggle with in these types of movies is the fantastical element. And I don’t mean things like an ice sculpture of a man coming to life and becoming the romantic interest of the female lead, which is not a Hallmark Christmas movie, but is eerily similar to Hallmark’s formula. I’m talking about the more basic elements of these stories, such as the small business owner having any kind of life outside of their business, which if you ask anyone who owns a business, they would say is just as implausible as the ice sculpture storyline. They also ignore any realistic issues or inequities or systemic barriers to success. What does this trope offer these characters, and why are these real aspects excluded from the narrative? 

HUGHES: I love thinking about this as fantastic on the level of an ice sculpture coming to life because you’re not too far off. There’s so much research about how difficult it is not only to start a small business, but to keep it going. It really does take an incredible toll on people’s lives, on their families. So, it’s really funny again that we have this small business owner at the heart of these films that are meant to be cozy, family oriented, magical. The small business owner resolves some really critical tensions in American culture. 

The first thing that the small business owner offers us is freedom. Freedom from bad bosses. There are no bad bosses at Christmas. Scrooge teaches us that. People can be in control of their own lives. They use their businesses to build their identity. It’s their life goal, their creative outlet, their dream. It’s also a way for individuals to prove their self-sufficiency and their grit, their merit and their independence. We have these characters over and over again saying they don’t want help. They want to be able to accomplish something on their own. There’s one film even where a man works through a heart attack because he’s so committed to his small business. I know. That’s a real longevity strategy there. 

On the one hand, you have this incredible freedom, but it’s freedom that can be scary, exhausting, even lonely, maybe. On the other side of the coin in the context of Hallmark, it doesn’t harm people’s familial relations. Actually, it helps them. The small business is the glue that keeps the family together. Because in so many of these films, it is the small business where our characters connect. We have a father and daughter who go into business together. We have love interests. He owns an inn. She owns a marketing company. He needs business. Well, wonderful, they can work together. So, in these instances, you don’t need to balance work and life because they are the same thing. 

You also mentioned the economic tensions that these films tend to paper over. That family label that I’m talking about – the idea that the small business supports family – that becomes important there, too. Because in the context of these films, family is this very loose label that gets applied not only to the owner and their relatives, but also to customers and employees. There’s no possible tension between these various groups, as there would be maybe in real life. 

In many cases, these groups have different economic interests; not so in the Hallmark holiday film. In the Hallmark holiday film, they’re all family, they’ll all sacrifice for each other. They have a sense of shared obligation. I’ll give you one of my favorite examples, Christmas at the Golden Dragon. It is one of those films that was trying to improve Hallmark’s representation. It features a Chinese family. The parents run a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Dragon, and the parents are deciding to close the restaurant. But the Golden Dragon is so important to the entire community that everyone comes together to have one last hurrah, one last meal at the Golden Dragon before it closes. 

So, you have employees who were just laid off, who just lost their jobs, you have customers and their small children all coming in to work for free at this restaurant and to center their holiday experience around a small business. And this all climaxes in a scene where everyone decorates the Christmas tree at the restaurant. When I say these films emphasize the small business as the center of family, this is really evident in this tree decorating scene. This incredible sequence where this entire town is coming together to volunteer for a business so that they can recognize how important the business was to the community. 

Think about what this would look like, everyone coming to Domino’s, right? Everybody working a shift for free. Not necessarily something we would expect. All of these characters from the town are bringing deeply personal family ornaments to decorate this tree. And when I say deeply personal, I mean one character is bringing a medal that they brought with them when they immigrated from Guadalajara. Another character is bringing a handprint of their child that was previously given to a deceased parent. Truly imagine what this would look like if you showed up to Target with your most precious ornament, the ornament that you put on your tree every year. 

In the context of this film, that really intimate personal Christmas ritual takes place at the small business. They are the heart and soul of the community. They are the heart and soul of the town. Any kind of potential conflict that you might have between employees, bosses, customers, that is completely resolved with the label of family. 

The other place where the small business owner smooths over some tensions or sidesteps political questions of taxes and welfare and things that people already see as these tense and fraught conversations is in the way that they take care of the small town and they do it through volunteerism. The small business owner in these films does so much to provide jobs, sometimes to provide housing, to provide food, to provide childcare for their entire community. 

In the context of Christmas and Christmas celebrations, not only do they volunteer to take care of people in various ways, small businesses are making so many charitable donations. They run toy and book drives, they donate fudge, they donate groceries, handmade pies, they donate clothes, they give free trolley rides, they sponsor tree lightings, they sponsor parades, crafting events, Victorian strolls, they run the Christmas market, they play Santa. In one case, they literally are Santa. In all of these situations, the small business owner really is the glue that holds the community together. They make sure that people don’t go hungry. They make sure that people have homes and they do it all voluntarily. They are not compelled by taxes, they are not compelled by democratically elected officials who decide how we want to apportion goods and services in society. The small business owner is the virtuous upstanding character that will take care of their small town. 

HOST: Your research looks at how these frameworks can impact how we see things. How does a movie like A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe, which is a real Hallmark movie title by the way … 

HUGHES: Of course! I’ve seen it. 

HOST: How does that influence our broader societal beliefs about success, fairness and the American dream? Are these narratives a reflection or an influence of real-world attitudes? 

HUGHES: The question of real-world influence is really what got me interested in this work, because I wanted to have a better sense of how our understanding of particular economic characters shaped real-world policy. We can think of other characters alongside the small business owner, characters like the taxpayer or the shareholder or the welfare queen. These characters that star in stories are repeated over and over again both to support and justify certain kinds of legislation or policy or attitudes. 

I’ll give you an example of some of the policies that I was thinking of as I was watching these Hallmark films and thinking about the small business owner in particular. So, we’re talking about the early 2020s. This is the era of a lot of pandemic policy that is designed to help various groups weather the storm of that crisis. I was really struck by the fact that if you remember the PPP loans, the Paycheck Protection Program loans, those were designed for small businesses. 

Earlier, we talked about the fact that the businesses that are defined as small in that context were maybe a little bit bigger than we would think of. I was struck by the fact that these loans, this program that was designed for small businesses, were forgiven. At the same time, there was a program to forgive student loans, and that program was struck down. Now, all these policies are statements in some way or another regarding who matters within our culture, who is deserving of government support and who isn’t. That’s really what I was interested in there. It comes down to these questions of who is deserving of government largesse or who deserves taxpayer money. Those budgetary discussions are conversations about who we think the heroes of our economy are, who we think deserves our support. 

These policy conversations can seem really arcane. They can seem kind of boring when we get into the nitty-gritty of what programs are going to be subsidized, where the tax breaks are going to go, but really, they’re conversations about who we think the heroes of our economy are. Who should be the people in charge of making decisions? Who counts as a taxpayer? And who do we really care about as a culture? Thinking about the way in which certain characters or narratives get told in popular media is one way for us to see where these conversations are happening. 

HOST: It’s interesting that you’re talking about a lot of these real impacts, these down-in-the-weeds things, but with Hallmark movies, there’s this almost nostalgic ideal that people connect with so much. We know these are ridiculous; we know these are far-fetched. Why do we buy into it? Why do these movies resonate so much? 

HUGHES: It’s interesting because Hallmark makes these same kinds of movies all year round. If you want to watch a version of Christmas Cookie Catastrophe, but with Easter bunnies, I’m sure you could find it. But they really make their way into mainstream culture during the Christmas holiday season. I wonder if it is because Christmas is a time of exception. It’s a time of magic. We have this sense that fantasies and dreams and wishes can come true. 

Christmas is also a time of connection. It’s when a lot of Americans who don’t have a ton of vacation time might actually have time to spend with their families, time that they might use to watch these films together. So, I think there’s a really lovely mirroring of what we see on screen. Characters taking time out of the hustle and the bustle to really focus on what matters to them, focus on their communities, focus on their families. And that’s just so lovely. That fantasy is really appealing. Also, sometimes I think you just want to see full-grown adults drink hot chocolate like it’s the only beverage that’s ever been invented. (laughs). 

HOST: In your view, how could these movies better address the realities of our current system? 

HUGHES: That is a great question because I almost wonder if you treated small business in a more realistic way, if it would lose all its charm. As we talked about, it is extremely hard to run a small business. It takes away from your family. There are many ways in which it is antithetical to what we’re meant to be doing during the holiday season, taking time, reflecting. 

You know what you have me thinking of is You’ve Got Mail and The Shop Around the Corner, two Christmas movies. The Shop Around the Corner being the original; You’ve Got Mail being the adaptation with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. If you’re looking for a more realistic movie about small business, it might be that one where Meg Ryan runs this beautiful small business that everybody loves. And by the end of the movie, that store has been closed and it has been taken over by the big business that is run by Tom Hanks’s character. 

HOST: She even ends up working for him, right? 

HUGHES: Yes! So, you have the romantic resolution kind of paper over the fact that there are parts of that film that are quite painful, such as where she’s having to say goodbye to this beautiful store. That is maybe the most realistic small business while still being the Hollywood version that I can think of. But then again, I don’t necessarily think that people go to Hallmark for realism. 

Another way some of these Christmas stories could be told would be without the small business and thinking about other collectives of people and of care where people come together and support each other, whether it’s a group of friends, or a mutual aid group, or your union. There are other organizations that do a lot of that kind of community care but remain invisible. So, it could be looking to other parts of our culture, other parts of our society where that kind of caretaking is happening but isn’t quite as vaulted as the small business owner. 

HOST: Yeah. I’m trying to imagine what a union Christmas story would look like. Reunion? 

HUGHES: I’d watch it. Yeah, Christmas ReUnions with the U capitalized. I love it. 

HOST: It would definitely be a different take. 

HUGHES: Yeah. Hey, solidarity forever, you know? Christmas solidarity. 

HOST: So, my last question, because I have to ask, after watching 40-plus Hallmark movies, what was your favorite? 

HUGHES: Oh boy, what a question. If we’re talking about the small business owner, and we want to think about a film where that is prevalent, there’s this film called We Wish You a Married Christmas. The movie basically centers around a town of 513 people, somewhere rural, maybe upstate New York or something like that. The town seems to be populated entirely by small business owners. We’re talking, somebody runs an inn, somebody has a tree farm, somebody has a llama farm. I don’t know how you sustain a llama farm in a town of 513 people, but they make it work. 

The entire purpose of the town is to rescue the marriages of fighting couples coming up from New York City. Basically, these couples will check in, they’re fighting, and then all of the small business owners collaborate to make them do cute, small-town things, engage with local shopping and that sort of thing. That’s enough for them to rekindle their love. So that’s a pretty good one if you want to see a lot of small businesses at once. 

HOST: Wow, like they don’t have enough jobs, now they’ve got to be therapists, too. 

HUGHES: Oh, I know. There are multiple films actually where the small business owner is referred to as a community “therapist,” a therapist with a side of pie, that kind of thing. So, they’re not only taking care of the economic health of the town, providing jobs, providing homes, etc. But they’re also maintaining the town’s mental health. They really do it all. 

HOST: Well, I think you’ve given us a lot to think about when we watch our next Hallmark movie. I know I probably will never look at them the same way again. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. 

HUGHES: Oh, thank you. It’s been great. 

OUTRO: That was CSU Film and Media Studies Associate Professor Kit Hughes, speaking about her research into one of the most beloved tropes behind many Hallmark movies. I’m your host, Stacy Nick, and you’re listening to CSU’s The Audit.