NOBODY CAN COUNT IN CHRISTMAS MOVIES!
Since I wrote so much about Hallmark’s holiday movies in my Christmas column, I figure this is the perfect time to follow it up with my major complaint about almost all of them. And that is…they never portray passage of time right!
I honestly began writing this article…a year ago! And now, after watching so many this season, I’m upset about the topic all over again!
The movies will state something like this, but then have scenes with TWENTY days left until the holiday!
It happens every year. Well, at least since 2017, when Mr. X and I began viewing them. He initiated our new-ish tradition of watching tons of Hallmark holiday movies because we don’t decorate or have get-togethers anymore. We never seem to have enough time, (nor energy!,) these days for everything we used to do for decades. Some of those movies are good, most are pretty bad to awful, and a very few are actually wonderful! So that latter group make seeing them a worthwhile activity. (I lauded the recent best ones in that previous article, which you can still read right here: itsnotaboutme.tv/news/holiday-merry-christmas-2025.)
But what drives me crazy in almost all of the films is that usually-erroneous portrayal of time in them. They never seem to know exactly how many days it is till Christmas! I’ve never seen one movie do it right! Can no one count in these movies? A character will say something like, “Well, we have only three days to do our shopping for Christmas morning,” and then we’ll see them do activities for at least five more days!
It seriously happens in just about every TV movie that we see at this time of year. And trust me—we’ve watched at least two hundred of them over the years! And it’s not just Hallmark who does it wrong—we’ve noticed those errors on other channels, as well, such as UP, GAF, the CW, and even the obscure Bounce TV.
The weird thing is that…sometimes they even have the days written out in a scene or two! At first I thought that revelation was really helpful because the timing just had to be correct in those, right? But even then it’s usually at least a bit wrong.
But they’ll show us the characters doing NINE days worth of activities!
Would it be so difficult to just get those numbers right? If they have to mention the days or weeks until Christmas, why can’t they just number them correctly? I’m beginning to take it personally, because many other viewers would just let it go. But I cannot. It’s such a little thing to have the dialogue be mathematically correct that I feel they’re doing it wrong on purpose at this point.
Someone—the writers, proofreaders, script supervisor, continuity person, editor, director, producers, and even the actors themselves—should catch all these mistakes! (On my very first guest-starring role on a national TV show, I caught something like that in the script, and even as we were shooting the scene, I told the director that my character wouldn’t be in it! I now sort-of regret causing myself that omission, but how was I the only person on such a professional production to have realized it?! Leave it to the newbie. I think that Hallmark needs me on their productions, in any capacity, don’t you?)
And why is the deadline for everything—stories, newspaper articles, pictures, payments, buying a new house, getting a job, you name it—in most of these stories exactly on Christmas Day??? Who does that? The only Christmas deadline in real life is for the gifts! They must be bought, wrapped, and delivered by then. Dot, dash, end of story.
And, actually, that’s the end of this story, as well. You get the drift. Now, please excuse me while I go start working on a believable holiday romance screenplay, so that we’ll all have something correct time-wise to see in a couple of years!
