Christmas comes but once a year — unless you are an avid watcher of the Hallmark Channel during the holidays. Then it comes two weeks before Halloween and lasts 70 nights, leading right up to the end of a very long December.

Granted, I am not usually an avid watcher of the Hallmark Channel, nor am I exactly the target audience for TV movies about single adults on Christmas. I am nevertheless a single adult who also writes for TV professionally, and as a former Catholic school student I'm reasonably familiar with the tenets of Christ. So I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the whole Hallmark phenomenon from the outside.

"You can't measure Christmas spirit," said a Hallmark movie character, probably. But the numbers are remarkable, especially if you consider the dire straits the rest of the entertainment industry finds itself in. Last winter, the network's original movies, along with Hallmark Mystery's Christmas slate, pulled in 34 million viewers. Those ratings made Hallmark the most-watched entertainment cable network in the last quarter of the year.

The movies have become so successful that one newspaper in Canada, where many of them are shot, called Hallmark movies an economic driver of northern Ontario. You know a made-for-TV movie is influential when it's talked about in the same way we describe North America's timber market.

What is going on here? What's hidden in the dense jungle that is Hallmark Christmas programming? What are the rest of us missing out on (or protected from)? What makes them so appealing?

To find out, I decided to embark on a perilous mission: watching every new made-for-TV movie — all 24 of them — in the Hallmark Channel's annual "Countdown to Christmas" lineup. Sure, millions of people do this annually, but technically speaking I am not the Hallmark Channel’s key demographic. For me, a 40-year-old heterosexual male, this experiment would be my most daring act of gonzo journalism, my own journey into the "hearth of darkness."

I wanted to know what the rise of Hallmark says about our relationship to Christmas, family, work, and romance. Could discovering these answers change the way I saw Hallmark? More importantly, could Hallmark change me? Yes, I have my preconceived reservations about these pictures (e.g. iffy politics, casts as devoid of nonwhite characters as a family of snowmen), but a forced marathon of Hallmark programming had the potential to help me see past these flaws and warm my cynical heart.

Or drive me insane.

DAY ONE

It's barely Thanksgiving when I pull up A Royal Montana Christmas, but Countdown to Christmas has already been chugging along since Oct. 17. To be clear: not only is Oct. 17 not winter, it's less than a month removed from summer. To catch up I'll need to watch twice as many of these films per week. It's a frazzling workload, befitting a frazzled Hallmark heroine.

Although in Royal Montana Christmas, our heroine is more regal than frazzled. "She's a princess. I'm a washed-up ballplayer," explains Huntley Baylock, a beefy rancher and the male lead. Huntley is in love with Princess Victoria of Zelarnia, who's escaped royal life to the Montana ranch where her late father brought her as a child. She's joined by Gabriel, her gentlemen-in-waiting, who spends most of the movie dismissing Montana through the cunning use of food metaphor, such as, "The only 'ranch' I know is ranch dressing." (Why has a Zelarnian butler partaken of so much ranch dressing is a hard question to answer, but I digress).

Because my interest in romance is outweighed by my interest in history, I find myself pondering Zelarnian international relations instead of the relations between Princess Victoria and Huntley, or between Gabriel and his appetite ("The only thing I want to lasso is a box of donuts.") Is Zelarnia a constitutional monarchy? Is it a member of NATO? What is its human rights record? Has it won the World Cup? Is it at war with Aldovia, the kingdom from A Christmas Prince? You might say I'm focusing on the wrong things. I say we must be vigilant against Zelarnian expansion.

DAY TWO

With A Christmas Angel Match and Merry Christmas, Ted Cooper!, Hallmark's prominent motifs begin to come into focus: Opposites attracting, quirky holiday traditions, family, better-than-expected acting, perfectly coiffed male hair and the laziest montages I've ever seen.

And death. Yes, death. For a studio famous for its relentless positivity, Hallmark's Christmas movies are plagued with grief. Almost every story includes a lead character processing the loss of a loved one. An occasional off-screen death is a standard way to provide backstory or raise the narrative stakes, but Hallmark's bloodlust knows no bounds. Taken one after the other, it feels pathological. One hunky widower dad is a rom-com catch. Too many is a slaughter, and the Hallmark Channel has killed more wives than Forensic Files. It gives the movies a gothic subtext. In this sense, I suppose, the network is carrying on the tradition of Dickens. What is A Christmas Carol if not a story about ghosts?

I know I’m a kind-of bro ambassador to Hallmark nation, so it feels regressive admitting how much I'm looking forward to Christmas On Duty, a military rom-com. But I am. Not that I'm expecting Janel Parrish to reenact the ending of Apocalypse Now.

I’m curious how a network as traditional as Hallmark will portray the armed forces. Predictably, it turns out. The only conflicts in Christmas on Duty are personal rather than geopolitical, like when our two star-crossed soldiers' (Parker Young and Parrish) discover they're after the same promotion:

"Blair, you know how much being infantry means to my family."

"It's not personal."

"Yes it is. Turns out my dad was right. A Burch will always choose ambition over friendship."

Oh snap! Turns out the greatest threat to military readiness is a Hallmark romance plot.

DAY THREE

I'm midway through A Newport Christmas, about a Gilded Age socialite who time travels to the present and meets a cute historian. The cute historian is explaining how the Christmas Comet's orbit will determine how they get back to the past (long story) when my mom calls. She and my father are flying out immediately after the holidays and, for the first time in a decade, are unable to host Christmas.

The family needs a new location to gather for the holiday. I agree to host, even though I haven't bought a tree, or decorated, and until this exact moment had completely ignored real Christmas in lieu of the scripted ones I'm being paid to watch. Tasked with preparing a holiday party on short notice, I suddenly find myself in a scenario that feels eerily familiar. Is my real life merging with the hectic holiday planning of Hallmark? Is reality collapsing in on itself? I have a sudden urge to check Google Maps and see if I can find Zelarnia.

DAY FOUR

Ebenezer Scrooge is a high-powered female CEO (Erin Krakow) in Christmas Above the Clouds, which re-locates Dickens's A Christmas Carol to the first-class cabin of a contemporary Christmas Eve flight. By the time she lands, "Ella Neezer" learns the error of her lonely ways and reconnects with the handsome ex-boyfriend she met back when he was working in their college library. (His new career goal is to "do something to help at-risk children.")

This story highlights one of Hallmark's more questionable recurring themes: that being single is a character flaw. Before her flight, Ella asks a colleague, "Why can't we see a nice, high-powered, hard-working single woman have the vacation of her life?" A reasonable question!

In the horrible "Christmas future" Ella foresees, her would-be lover is all alone, still stacking books. It prompted one Letterboxed reviewer to plead: "STOP. MAKING. BEING. A. LIBRARIAN. SOMEONE'S. WORST. FATE."

To be honest, I'm surprised by my visceral reaction to Hallmark's stance on single men and women, or as the company probably calls them internally, "hermits and crones." I like relationships. I've even been in a few! But I typically avoid writing about them. Twenty years ago, publicly griping about one's romantic woes in New York City landed you a six-season comedy on HBO. Now it makes you the symptom of a loneliness epidemic, or the subject of a dozen identical think pieces, or the reason Trump got reelected, or whatever. I'm not dismissing the importance of mental health. In fact, my preference for pondering affairs of the heart only through the lens of basic cable programming probably qualifies as its own kind of psychological disorder.

I'm deliriously woozy from the side effects of a winter COVID booster the day I watch Three Wisest Men, which I’m happy to report is not about the male loneliness crisis. I'm having trouble following the plot, which is troubling, considering all Hallmark movies have the same two or three plots.

Turns out I'm watching the third installment of the Three Wise Men and a Baby trilogy and missing some backstory. I do a little research. The Three Wise Men series is Hallmark's Avatar, if Avatar had snowball fights and blatant product placement from King's Hawaiian dinner rolls. The "wise men" are played by Tyler Hynes, Paul Campbell, and Andrew Walker, some of the biggest and most prolific of the Hallmark hunks. Paul Campbell is "the cute one." Andrew Walker is the classically handsome but slightly dull leading man. And Hynes, everyone's favorite, is the dark-haired, brooding bad boy. His fans call themselves "Hynies."

DAY EIGHT

If Christmas on Duty was less polemic than I was expecting, Tidings for the Season is way, way more. Tamera Mowry (cue Sister, Sister theme!) is Lucy, whose precocious, aspiring-journalist son gets to shadow local news anchor Adam Kade (B.J. Britt). The problem? Lucy thinks Adam's broadcasts are too upsetting. "Who wants to watch the news, anyway?" she asks. "All that negativity." Adam, it seems, needs to stop covering pesky bummers like, say, supply chain problems or City Hall.

By the end of the film, he’s focusing on human interest stories, including a local man who drops scarfs on park benches for homeless people to find, or how the Christian banking company (and, presumably, Hallmark sponsor) Thrivent Financial helped one local with an idea "figure out my finances so I could make it a reality."

Most Hallmark movies encourage us to look on the sunny side of life, but this is the first one that tells us to deny the existence of shadows. The movie ends with Adam making a rather Orwellian pronouncement: "The truth is, sometimes you don't need facts."

DAY THIRTEEN

Set in the notoriously cutthroat world of decorative glass blowing, Melt My Heart This Christmas follows aspiring artist Holly James (Laura Vandervoort), apprentice to Bianca Bonhomie, a legendary glass blower (you know, one of those). As a Flashdance fan, I find the montage where Holly operates a raging furnace in a cocktail dress (long story) to be an outrageously sexy moment in an otherwise family-friendly marathon. Five stars.

Midway through the movie I smell a foul odor, and for a brief moment I wonder if this experiment has given me a stroke. Perhaps our brains did not evolve to process this much holiday melodrama. Ironically, there will be no romantic partner to call 911. The fire department will find my body weeks from now, face down in a puddle of hot cocoa. Maybe in death I'll be the backstory revealed in a Hallmark movie.

It's not a stroke. The smell is coming from underneath my kitchen sink. With days to go before my impromptu family holiday party, a pipe has burst and turned the cabinet into a fetid swamp no Christmas spice Yankee Candle can mask.

I attempt to fix it myself, emboldened by the flannel-clad trad boyfriends I've been watching. After I inevitably fail, I call the handyman. I ask if the pipe can be repaired before the 25th, not wanting my relatives' Christmas gift to be black mold. I get the phone version of a shrug before the handyman tells me to "have a Merry Christmas" (translation: We will not be speaking again.)

DAY TWENTY-ONE

Over halfway into my experiment, I am treated to an unexpected delight. A Grand Ole Opry Christmas features cameos from country music stars and gives me my new favorite holiday song: "All I Want for Christmas Is a Cowboy," sung by Megan Morony.

Give me tall, hot, in a Stetson
Something I can unwrap like a present…
Please, Santa, please
All I want for Christmas is a cowboy

Is my frozen heart finally thawing? Is Hallmark working its holiday magic on me or is the pressure of my impending deadline and my hosting duties making me descend into delirium?

DAY TWENTY-TWO

My home still smells.

No matter, I must forge forward. My next two watches, The Christmas Cup and Christmas at the Catnip Café, probe the familiar question of work-life balance for two very different women (a U.S. Marine who coaches her neighbors for a Christmas tournament, and a marketing executive who inherits a cat cafe). Will Staff Sgt. Kelly Brandt (Rhiannon Fish) move to Hawaii and take a military contracting job or remain in town with local fireman Quinn Stokley? Will Olivia fly back into her dream apartment in Oakland or stay in Upstate New York to sell coffee and/or cats? ("I don't have any space in my life for a cafe," Olivia argues, "let alone one that's centered around animals!")

This common Hallmark plot point is a widely noted flaw. The stories (almost) always end with the woman sacrificing her career for the sake of a man. Beyond the gender politics, this just gives me horrible economic anxiety. In today’s market it has been painful to keep watching characters turn down job offer after job offer. It's so common that when Sgt. Brandt from The Christmas Cup gives up a contracting job in Hawaii to stay with her new boyfriend I actually found myself rooting for her to go to war (sorry, Sgt. Brandt).

DAY TWENTY-FOUR

Hallmark has at least one movie where the woman keeps her job. Unfortunately it's literally a fantasy. She's Making a List stars Lacey Chabert (the John Cena of Hallmark) as an employee of the Naughty or Nice Group, a firm that evaluates children's behavior and determines if they've been bad or good for Santa. On purely thematic grounds, this late addition is my favorite Hallmark Christmas movie. The story allows for some shockingly nuanced explorations of ethics (is there an objective "naughty" and "nice?"), rehabilitation and even artificial intelligence.

Chablet is horrified when her boss introduces a "super-algorithm" that uses "data from all the children in the world" that detects naughtiness "without any human beings at all." It's heady stuff for the network, likely from a screenwriter who knows the Hallmark movie will be the first casualty if the studios start delegating features to AI. I guess I’ll find out next year.

And now, my mission has come to an end. I've withstood the full assault of Hallmark's Christmas blitzkrieg. I have crossed the River Peppermint Styx. I have seen what lies in the hearths of darkness. I’m exhausted, and I haven’t even mentioned The Snow Must Go On, Holiday Touchdown: A Bill’s Love Story, or Hallmark’s Hanukkah rom-com, Oy to the World! But at least my sink has been fixed.

What I discovered was both less and more than I expected. Hallmark movies, while not as bad as critics might condemn, don’t contain the hidden depths or deep romantic holiday truths I had hoped to discover. Even fans often admit the movies’ appeal includes their “predictability,” their “coziness,” and how they allow you to “turn your brain off.” Those same fans, I’d wager, will have trouble years from now singling the films out. But is this a bug or a feature? Hallmark’s infamous, rom-commodified idea of Christmas is already more famous than any of the network’s individual movies — not to mention most mainstream films, full stop. The network’s cliches could outlast us all, living on through the memories of meet-cutes and small towns. It’s a level of Christmas marketing that puts Hallmark in the same echelon as the Roman Empire. Or the apostles. Or Mariah Carey.

And what of me? Did nightly visits from Hallmark warm this Scrooge’s holiday heart? It was a challenge. Looming over this whole affair is the fact that I was born the day after Christmas and have complicated emotions about the season. As a kid, it was tough for my birthday to literally follow the Son of God’s, while today my holidays are forever intermingled with the existential delight of aging. Christmas is stressful for everyone, but dreading it is my literal birthright.

This year, however, I was so preoccupied with cataloging Hallmark’s holiday stories that the actual holiday has flown by, leading me to the eve of my own unorthodox Christmas with a brain full of basic cable fairy tales. Not exactly Christmas magic, but a kind of dark magic of the movies. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift.