1. Big news: The year of our Lord 2026 will bring the saints of God the first ever Anglican Hallmark Christmas movie. No joke: Christmas in Canterbury is due to premiere on December 11, filmed at Canterbury Cathedral, with children’s choirs and winter romance and a performance of “Once in Royal David’s City.” Those in the Episcopal and Anglican traditions will, sadly, have to pause their Advent observance for a night of irenic and romantic holiday shenanigans.
We know this because, over at the Atlantic, Alexandra Petri shares her experience as an extra in the film, not only cataloging the history of the Hallmark Christmas movie phenomenon but also sharing the surreal experience of watching the movie come together. Some highlights from her reflection:
The Hallmark Channel turned 25 this year, and the brand is strong — so strong that specifying “Hallmark Christmas movie” feels redundant. On weekends from mid-October through December 2025, more U.S. women were watching Hallmark’s programming than that of all other cable networks, including news and sports, according to Hallmark. Over that period as a whole, Hallmark was the second-most-watched cable network among women, behind only Fox News Channel (do you prefer countdowns to Christmas, or wars on Christmas?).
Netflix is now in the holiday-movie game with steamier concepts such as Hot Frosty, in which a snowman becomes a man with washboard abs. And short Christmas movies are being made just for your phone, in vertical-video form. Have you seen Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas on ReelShort, a platform for “microdramas”? The 71 episodes are each less than two minutes long; this microdrama is not even trying to have realistic fake snow. My social-media feeds are now garlanded with AI Christmas videos that purport to be time capsules of the 1970s or ’80s, showing sweater-clad families laughing as their turkey materializes out of thin air. Congratulations, we used all the water that formerly became snow to give you this creepy, plotless fauxstalgia!
Hallmark, despite the available technology, is still something made by humans for humans. The snow may be fake, but at least the fake snow is real. There is something tremendous about being among people who, using three-dimensional matter, make things nice for a living. Washington, D.C., where I live, and the world, where I also live, have both felt not nice lately. Sometimes you want to climb into a Hallmark movie.
What makes a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie different from the rise of AI-generated slop slowly filling up my social media timelines? For Petri, the answer lies in its production: At least it is a crafted work of art/media made by humans. Throughout her experience as an extra, she recounts the exquisite detail that went into making Canterbury snowy in the middle of July and the challenges she faced as an actor simply walking while being filmed. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the movies are works of art:
My own mother, who initially refused to be quoted on the record for this article, is one of these fans. But can she remember the name of even one Hallmark movie? Absolutely not. It feels almost rude to ask — like demanding that a fan of winter name a favorite snowflake. The point is not the snowflake (which is unique and exquisite). The point is the flurry, and its overall effect. Does my mother love Hallmark movies individually? Yes. But what she really loves is being surrounded by them all. She is watching one right now, as I type this. (It is August.) […]
Articulating what makes Hallmark magical is indeed tough. Even my mother, with whom I’ve watched so many of these movies, can only offer: “They are predictably upbeat, generally enjoyable, and feature a suite of actors who become familiar faces over time.” Generally enjoyable? As a Star Wars nut myself, I have less difficulty explaining my fandom. “It’s a multigenerational, modern-day myth,” I would say about Star Wars. It’s life, but space. Something similar can be said of Hallmark, which is its own genre of mythology: life, but nice. It’s life, but with someone helping you out of a sleigh in a gentlemanly manner.
My wife shares the experience of Petri’s mother: She loves the genre but can’t remember the name of a single movie she’s watched in that genre. The language of “slop” as a description of AI-generated media designed to anesthetize instead of entertain is a recent innovation, but Hallmark Channel Christmas movies have been blurring that line now for 25 years. Held in conversation with one another, both the AI Christmas microdrama and the Hallmark Christmas movie genre reflect back to us all sorts of human longings. Home, romance, peace, kindness, niceness, that Danish word “hygge” that was so popular a few years back … even if our media landscape isn’t producing art that matches the depth or richness of that longing, it remains proof that these universal longings exist. If the tastemakers of our age aren’t producing the kind of media that addresses those longings, “the rocks will cry out” so to speak, and audiences will get it however we can.
No, I don’t have high hopes for this movie. But as long as Hallmark is making mildly spiritual Christmas films located in important Christian historical sites, give me one located in Wittenberg, Germany, where a monk and a nun fall in love and leave their holy orders after hearing a Christmas sermon from Martin Luther. Call it The Christmas Vows. I promise I’ll remember its name and put it on every year before our annual White Christmas rewatch.
2. On the topic of longing, over at the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs offers a book review of To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World by Ian Marcus Corbin. In short: Jacobs writes that the book is a great reflection on the “sociality of home-making,” the need to combat modern alienation by connecting well with other people. The book would be better, he writes, if it prioritized how other people can lead us astray and make life worse for everyone.
What all this means for Corbin’s book is straightforward: The need for belonging that he so eloquently describes has not only been widely felt for a long time but has also been easily exploited by people and organizations that have absolutely no interest in a “new culture that will be humane and good.” It seems obvious, then, that we do not need belonging as such, a sense of being at home in the world as such; we need, rather, to belong in the right ways, in ways that help us and those around us to achieve true flourishing, not a corrupted perversion of it that depends for its coherence on exclusion. (Even T.S. Eliot, the closest thing to a presiding genius in this book, just a few years before he wrote the words that give Corbin his title, suggested that if you want to build a healthy community “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”)
Corbin, let me hasten to add, is not unaware of these temptations. He pointedly notes that we moderns tend to misunderstand belonging because “our culture has formed us to pursue it in a manner that is ultimately self-defeating, and that leaves modern people vulnerable to the siren song of snake-oil salesmen, hustle-and-grind gurus, and moral monsters like Hitler and Goebbels.” Yet this awareness does not shape the structure of the book, and I find that unfortunate.
A full acknowledgment of this essential problem — what certain German political activists used to call Scheingemeinschaft, “sham community” — should, I think, initiate Corbin’s argument and govern its development. The real and possible counterfeits of healthy belonging need to be acknowledged, and what makes them false needs to be named, before you can go on to talk convincingly and persuasively about what a proper “oikophilic quest” would be. (That’s Corbin’s coinage: Oikophilia is the love of home.) The insight Corbin has at the end about these counterfeits would have made an ideal beginning for the book and would have enabled him to speak more concretely about the specific forms that a right construction of home would take — both a healthy perception of what we have been given, and a healthy orientation toward what we still must do.
3. There’s a beautiful video making the rounds this week about a father’s blessing at his son’s Air Force basic training graduation ceremony. The ceremony includes a final “tap out,” in which new graduates remain standing at attention until they are physically touched, “tapped” by family or friends who’ve come to celebrate them. The only videos I can find to embed on our site cut off the beginning of the father’s comments, which make it clear that the young airman comes from a churchy family. Regardless, I’m not sure you can articulate prior belovedness the way this father does without some measure of Christian faith in your life. I’m not crying, you’re crying.
(The hat tip for this find goes to Anthony Bradley on Substack, who also includes a transcript, if you want to read it out.)
4. At The Times, Sophie Heawood writes about a new TikTok trend of ditching makeup, and how she, as a 50-year-old writer frequently engaged in celebrity and society journalism, thought she’d give it a try. She found the practice liberating at a psychological level, though her daughter remains enthralled by TikTok’s much more popular cosmetic trends. Ladies of Mockingbird will have to tell me if this is true to their experience. Here are some of the experiences she reports:
Perhaps the feeling of this being my “true” face, warts and all, makes smiling more important. It makes being welcoming more important. It makes me want to really talk to people rather than weighing things up or hedging my bets with new people. I am reminded of the French expression about feeling good in your skin, and realise how acutely it applies to me right now. At the risk of sounding like a tradwife, I do feel that I’m somehow presenting my more honest face to people. That it’s easier to be entirely natural rather than somehow presenting a curated self to strangers.
We have all read lately about weight loss jabs quietening people’s “food noise”, but I had no idea that my brain contained so much make-up noise. Walking into parties, I now realise, I’m always slightly wondering if I should have done a red lip or if I should wipe off the one I’ve done. If I should really have dabbled in all that bronzer, given that I once interviewed my favourite model and she said, ugh, no, never wear bronzer, but, like, that was her and this is me and, like, maybe it suits me but not her, but then maybe I’ve applied it wrong?
On and on it goes, my mind asking why I can’t do eyeliner like that girl over there, or if someone with hooded eyes like mine should really use it at all. Nipping to the loo and being annoyed to discover that the concealer on my cheek scar has worn off when I was dancing. These thoughts, which I had no idea at all were so loud, are all gone. I feel so free! […]
On the third day of wearing no make-up, though, having not slept too well, I look in the dazzlingly bright office mirror and that confidence comes to an end. A blotchy face and bloodshot eyes stare back at me. Later on, at a literary event, a friend gives me a lipstick she bought herself before realising it was a coral kind of red that suits me better than the bluish tone she favours. I decide not to put it on, but still hold it in my hand like a talisman. Like an ex-smoker looking longingly at a cigarette.
5. In humor this week, McSweeney’s gives us “New Updates on the Arc of the Moral Universe”:
The arc of the moral universe scrolls in bed.
The arc of the moral universe eats leftover Halloween candy for breakfast.
The arc of the moral universe brought the coffee but forgot the donuts.
The arc of the moral universe steals a bulldozer and drives it into a data center.
The arc of the moral universe thanks you for posting bail.
The arc of the universe can’t help it if its love language is Bending Slightly and yours is Unceasing Toil.
It turns out Arc of the Moral Universe and I have a lot in common. Other laughs this week come courtesy of “Man Does ‘Safety’ Signal Alone At TV,” “Twenty-Five Very New, Foolproof Methods to Finally Rid Yourself of Insomnia,” and “I’m Totally Pulling Off These New Glasses.” Also, from SNL UK, “The Cher Witch Project” was a funny laugh, even if Halloween has come and passed.
6. Lots of folks sent us this LA Times profile of Anna Lembke, and rightfully so. Lembke’s first book, Dopamine Nation, came out in 2018, and in the intervening years it has shaped the popular imagination for understanding all the addictive-style behaviors of modern society. (I’m sure you’ve heard behaviors like online gambling, browsing social media, scrolling short vids, etc. described as “dopamine hits” — Lembke is one of the writers who helped popularize this language.) What, then, is the solution to living in a society of instant dopamine-induced relief with all manner of stresses and struggles? For Lembke, the answer is the title of her new book, Radical Surrender:
As one would expect from a psychiatrist specializing in addiction, “Radical Surrender” deals with the neuroscience of compulsion and despair. Lembke discusses the parts of the brain that activate in moments of crisis or transcendence, and the cognitive theories that help explain why uncertainty feels so uncomfortable.
But she also explores the parts of suffering and recovery that her profession doesn’t always have words for.
After decades of studying the ways humans wrestle with fear, Lembke is convinced that the act of surrender is as important as the search for order and certainty. To thrive, she believes, the drive to control our fortunes must be balanced with submission to a force beyond ourselves.
“It’s this fascinating paradox. We both want control, and we want to merge with the greater-than,” Lembke said recently from her home in Palo Alto. “We desperately want that, and we desperately need it. And yet we’re always sort of toggling back and forth between the two.”
Lembke is not suggesting everyone throw up their hands and let the deity of one’s choice take the wheel. [ed. note — not a bad idea even if she isn’t suggesting it.] Surrender, she writes, is not about giving up or abandoning responsibility.
It’s about “relinquishing the belief that our effort alone can dictate outcomes,” she writes. It’s about accepting that there is no path to a pain-free life, and no alternative to the messy and often uncomfortable job of being human.
There are lots of insights here, but I’d like to zoom in on her final insight. The belief that our effort alone can dictate outcomes is, according to Lembke, part of the problem. It is the root of fear, addiction, shame, anxiety, anger, and a host of other modern ills. In this way, Lembke taps into the secret sauce of the Christian gospel, which removes the effort from the equation and puts the outcome in the hands of a higher power. (Lembke is a big fan of the 12 Steps, which feature prominently in the article.) It’s a timely word for a people who’ve grown tired of their own inability to kick their bad internet habits.
7. Carnaval De Luz is here, U2’s sixteenth studio album. Bono and the boys are always good for an earnest croon about the love of God, as DZ pointed out two weeks back when “The Greatest Show on Earth” dropped as a single. Many of us are discovering this week that the album includes the last vocal recording from Dolly Parton, who got out of her bed rest to sing in the studio with the band two months before her passing. Bono reports that he cannot listen to the track anymore.
8. The last word this week goes to Russell Moore, who writes at Christianity Today, “How a Conversation This Week Made Me Rethink How Grace Works.” He recounts a recent conversation with a newly widowed woman whose adult children suggested she move out of her large and mostly empty family home. The multistory home and its intimidating staircase would be challenging, and maybe even dangerous, for her to keep up with as she grew old and her mobility faltered. She refused, but not for the reasons that most of us, Moore included, would expect:
Ruth is a recovering alcoholic. She hid her drinking problem — and denied that she had one — for many years. No one at her church or in her friend group knew. One night, though, she was so intoxicated that she fell down the stairs, hitting her head at the bottom, losing consciousness, and nearly bleeding out. She woke up in a hospital on a ventilator and thought, What has happened to my life?
She told me that, without that kind of alarm, she would never have seen herself as someone who needed help, as someone who could do anything other than the next right thing.
Ruth is sober now, has been for many years. She teared up as she said how grateful she was that she could spend those last few years with full clarity, really present with her husband.
“I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had wasted that time,” she said. “If I couldn’t remember.”
She not only found help for herself. She was leaving, right after she talked to me, to a meeting where she would mentor addicted young women who are starting the process of recovery. She was going to help them hold on for one more day.
She couldn’t do it though, she said, without the stairs. Every time she looked at them, they reminded her of just how bad things had become. They were an ongoing warning of just how much she could hurt herself and other people. They were a constant signpost that she’s not as invincible and invulnerable as she often thinks she is.
But they were more than a warning too. Those stairs reminded her that she had survived all of that. Her life did not end. With the grace of God and the love of her friends, she stood back up. And, in fact, there was a whole room of women waiting for her that she could never have helped if she had not fallen down that staircase. Or if she had not gotten back up.
The stairs reminded her, every time she saw them, that she was carried along by grace. And that she could carry grace along to others.
Strays:
- The newest Mockingbird podcast, Hope &, drops next week, with therapist Heidi Goehmann and poet Tanner Olson! Hold on to your despair loosely.
- At 1517, a look at W. H. Auden’s reflections on Martin Luther.
- Kind words about Mockingbird from Chris Nye on Substack.
- Six weeks back, I wrote here on the site about AI, anxiety, and law and gospel. Two weeks back, I got to talk about it with Pilgrim Christian Radio on their His People podcast.
