“Christmas at Pemberley Manor” and “Romance at Reindeer Lodge” may never make it to Oscar night, but legions of fans still love these sweet-yet-predictable holiday movies—and this season, many are making pilgrimages to where their favorite scenes were filmed.
That’s because Connecticut—the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime, and others—is promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.)
“It’s exciting — just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it visually,” said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a coach bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour.
Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong “Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour,” organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop.
To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the “Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail” map, which was launched by the wintry New England state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze.
Mayfield, who co-owns the company with her husband, Ken, said this was their first Christmas tour to holiday movie locations in Connecticut and other Northeastern states. It included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets, and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks.
With snow flurries in the air and Christmas songs piped from a speaker, the group stopped for lunch at Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre, where parts of the Hallmark films “Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” and “Rediscovering Christmas” were filmed.
Once home to America’s oldest seed company, the store is located in a historic district known for its stately 1700s and 1800s buildings. It’s an ideal setting for a holiday movie. Even the local country store has sold T-shirts featuring Hallmark’s crown logo and the phrase “I Live in a Christmas Movie. Wethersfield, CT 06109.”
“People just know about us now,” said Julia Koulouris, who co-owns the market with her husband, Spiro, crediting the movie trail in part. “And you see these things on Instagram and stuff where people are tagging it and posting it.”
Christmas movies are big business—and a big deal to fans
The concept of holiday movies dates back to 1940s, when Hollywood produced classics like “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Christmas in Connecticut,” which was actually shot at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.
In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel on TV, Hallmark “struck gold” with the romance movie “The Christmas card,” said Joanna Wilson, author of the book “Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-Themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies.”
“Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances,” she said.
The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines.
The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story.
“They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. It’s a part of the hope of the season,” she said. “Who doesn’t love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending.”
Hazel Duncan, 83, of Forest City, North Carolina, said she and her husband of 65 years, Owen, like to watch the movies together year-round because they’re sweet and family-friendly. They also take her back to their early years as a young couple, when life felt simpler.
“We hold hands sometimes,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet. We’ve got two recliners back in a bedroom that’s real small and we’ve got the TV there. And we close the doors off and it’s just our time together in the evening.”
Falling in love again… with a state
Connecticut’s chief marketing officer, Anthony M. Anthony, said the Christmas Movie Trail is part of a multipronged rebranding effort launched in 2023 that promotes the state not just as a tourist destination, but also as a place to work and live.
“So what better way to highlight our communities as a place to call home than them being sets of movies?” he said.
However, there continues to be debate at the state Capitol over whether to eliminate or cap film industry tax credits — which could threaten how many more of these movies will be made locally.
Christina Nieves and her husband of 30 years, Raul, already live in Connecticut and have been tackling the trail “little by little.”
It’s been a chance, she said, to explore new places in the state, like the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford, where a scene from “Ghost of Christmas Always” was filmed.
It also inspired Nieves to convince her husband — not quite the movie fan she is — to join her at a tree-lighting and Christmas parade in their hometown of Windsor Locks.
“I said, listen, let me just milk this Hallmark thing as long as I can, OK?” she said.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that the film title is “Christmas at Pemberley Manor,” not “Christmas at Pemberly Manor,” and the co-owner of Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre is named Spiro Koulouris, not Spiros Koulouris.
—Susan Haigh, Associated Press