Hallmark movies are a staple of any holiday season. The company has seemingly perfected the art of feel-good cinema, with all happy endings and no loose ends left behind. Their movies offer a wonderful background for any Christmas time baking session, or something to lull you into a doze after stuffing yourself full of sugar cookies. Along with Hallmark’s wholesome cards and trinkets you can buy at any of their stores, they have become supremely stable in the TV industry as something safe, charming and satisfying to watch.

The reason Hallmark movies are so popular? They are predictable. They apply the same formula to each of their movies, which is satisfying to the viewer every time and is charming to their viewers- women ages 25-54.

“It’s because they’re popular with older women, like my mother,” senior Sophie Welter said.

The formula is as follows- they introduce the main character, their love interest, then the problem or character that introduces the problem. There is a significant event caused by the problem character, that introduces conflict between the main character and the love interest. The main character has a revelation that spurs them into action that fixes the problem, and their relationship, at the same time.

“You feel like if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” junior Moe White said.

It’s not to say that the movies themselves aren’t enjoyable- that itself is what makes Hallmark stable in television. People do enjoy the movies. They enjoy the cheesy one-liners, the emotional conflict, the “Countdown to Christmas” the channel shows every year that people just can’t seem to help but love. It’s a fact of life that Hallmark movies really do get you in the holiday spirit. Even if you proclaim to not like Hallmark movies such as “Fir Crazy,” where a jobless young woman goes back to run her family’s Christmas tree lot and falls in love with a customer, “Journey back to Christmas,” which is about a WWII nurse who gets transported to modern-day in the holiday season and even “A Very Merry Mix-Up,” where a woman and her fiancé go to his family’s Christmas celebration, but ends up falling for her future brother in law. You can’t argue that Hallmark hasn’t carved their initials in TV’s Christmas tree.