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The holiday season is Hallmark’s Super Bowl.

This year alone, Hallmark has 80 hours of original holiday-themed programming, including two unscripted series, two scripted series, a holiday special and 24 movies with titles such as “The Snow Must Go On” and “Christmas at the Catnip Cafe” that run from mid-October to Christmas.

The company also has branched out into the experiences business with a Hallmark Christmas Cruise and the Hallmark Christmas Experience festival in Kansas City, Mo., where the company is based.

“I think that’s one of the most brilliant business decisions they’ve made, and they’re expanding there because they have to,” Anjali Bal, associate professor of marketing at Babson College, said of Hallmark’s experiences business. “It allows a connection between the consumer and the brand on a direct level in a way a movie can’t provide.”

It may seem like a far cry from Hallmark’s roots as a greeting card purveyor, but company executives say the holiday feelings evoked by its cards, ornaments and gift wrap translate into the type of content they produce.

And that plethora of content has turned Hallmark into a Christmas juggernaut, fueling competitors such as Lifetime and Netflix, which also produce holiday romantic comedies in the vein of Hallmark movies.

But Darren Abbott, Hallmark’s chief brand officer, doesn’t seem overly concerned.

“There’s a reason everyone else is trying to do this, and it’s because consumers are looking for this,” he said.

Hallmark’s legacy is rooted in celebrating holidays and Christmas, he said, “and no other business or brand has that.”

Countdown to Christmas

Founded in 1910 by an 18-year-old entrepreneur hawking postcards, Hallmark built its brand over the years through cards, holiday ornaments and retail stores.

The family-owned business ventured into entertainment in 1951 with the television presentation Hallmark Hall of Fame. Today, Studio City-based Hallmark Media operates three cable networks, including the Hallmark Channel, which debuted in 2001, as well as a subscription streaming service.

Though Hallmark had aired holiday movies practically since the inception of its cable channel, the company doubled down on the season in 2009, rolling out “Countdown to Christmas,” a 24-hour-a-day programming block focused solely on holiday content, a tradition that has lasted for 16 years.

Hallmark produces about 100 movies a year, both holiday and non-holiday films.

As a privately-held company, Hallmark did not disclose its finances, though executives acknowledge the holiday season is a key driver of entertainment revenue.

The expansion into entertainment is a way for Hallmark to stay in the zeitgeist over multiple generations and to diversify its business beyond just cards and retail products, analysts said.

“Their television stations and experiences business allows them to stay culturally relevant while staying true to their origin,” said Bal, the marketing professor.

Holiday programming — and the breezy, romantic fare Hallmark has become known for — has become increasingly popular with audiences.

Holiday features, both old movies and new, typically make up more than a third of total movie viewing time in December, according to U.S. television data from Nielsen. That percentage has remained fairly consistent for the last three years, though it reached 42% in December 2021.

Hallmark’s television viewership also edges up in the months leading into the holidays. In October, Hallmark commanded 1% of total viewership across linear TV and streaming, ticking up to 1.2% in November, according to Nielsen data. During that same time, competitor A&E, which owns Lifetime, remained constant at 0.9%.

Hallmark’s feel-good movies typically resonate with audiences across the country. They invariably conclude with happy endings (and at least one kiss), where romantic misunderstandings, financial difficulties and family drama all get resolved. After years of criticism, the movies’ casts and plot lines are diversifying, though experts say there is still room for improvement.

“These films are designed to be highly appealing to broad audiences,” said Kit Hughes, associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, who watched every single Hallmark film released in 2022 for research on the portrayal of small business owners. “They’re good consensus movies.”

To grow its audience and the types of stories it tells, Hallmark has increasingly turned to brand partnerships, including with the NFL.

Last year, the company released a movie centered around a Kansas City Chiefs romance; this year, it released one about Buffalo Bills fans. Hallmark also has a partnership with Walt Disney Co. to release a holiday movie next year set at Walt Disney World. The film stars Lacey Chabert, who Abbott describes as Hallmark’s “Queen of Christmas.”

Meeting Hallmark stars on cruise ships

Hallmark’s foray into the cruise business might seem odd, but it follows a long tradition of entertainment companies
creating real-world experiences with their fans, whether that’s on a ship, in a theme park or on a stage. As part of its massive tourism business, Disney operates its own line of cruise ships that promote the company’s classic characters.

Hallmark launched its first “Hallmark Christmas Cruise” last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines. The inaugural cruise from Miami to the Bahamas sold out even before a planned TV marketing campaign. After racking up a wait list of 70,000 people, Hallmark had to add a second cruise, Abbott said.

For this year’s cruise, from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, Hallmark had to book a bigger ship to accommodate demand. During the November cruise, attendees participated in various Christmas festivities, such as ornament-making workshops and cookie-decorating, and mingled with Hallmark stars in various on-stage games.

The cruises even spawned an unscripted Hallmark show focused on the experiences of several attendees and their interactions with Hallmark actors.

Many are not exactly household names, but they’ve starred in dozens of Hallmark holiday movies over the years and have loyal fan bases.

Abbott joined the cruise last year, and while he’s not a “cruise person,” he said he was fascinated to see how guests interacted with the stars.

“We’re a bit of a respite from what’s going on in the world right now,” he said, “and these experiences sort of hit on that at the right time and the right place.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.

Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.

Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.

The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.

Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.

Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.

Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.

While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.

Spagat and Golden write for the Associated Press.

Gov. Pete Wilson challenged President Clinton on Thursday to make California a test market for a tamper-proof federal identification card designed to keep illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits or getting jobs in the United States.

Later, a Wilson aide said one option might be a national identification card that would be carried by every legal resident of the United States, including U.S. citizens.

Wilson’s news conference at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service offices at Los Angeles International Airport was billed as the forum for a “major announcement regarding immigration.” In fact, Wilson’s statement expanded on his Aug. 9 program by only a small step–the proposed California test–while raising even more questions about his plan for the proposed identification card.

The governor acknowledged to a reporter that it probably is impossible to come up with a foolproof card because counterfeiters could fake birth certificates, passports or other documents that would be needed to get the card.

Wilson left unclear just who might have to possess the card: just foreign nationals living in the country legally or all U.S. citizens?

Asked who would have to carry the card, Wilson said: “Those who are applicants for employment and those who are applicants for benefits.”

Later, Wilson aide Dan Schnur said one possibility that arose during policy discussions in the governor’s office was a national identification card issued to all U.S. citizens and legal residents.

“A universal card is one option, but we’re not looking at it as an absolute condition,” Schnur said in telephone calls to reporters.

The form and scope of any card would be worked out in negotiations with the Clinton Administration, he said.

There have been periodic proposals for a national ID card, but they have always run up against strong opposition on civil liberties grounds.

Wilson was quoted by the Santa Monica Outlook while running for the U.S. Senate in 1982 that a proposed national identification card was “a lousy idea” because it would create a massive new bureaucracy. He also said he had some philosophical objections to the concept.

Schnur had no comment on that report, but he said conditions have changed greatly since the passage of immigration reform in the late 1980s and the heavy influx of illegal immigrants into California in recent years.

Thursday’s billing of a major new initiative drew a dozen television cameras and perhaps a score of reporters, a big turnout for any political event in Los Angeles. Although it turned out that Wilson’s statement was more of an expansion on a previous proposal than a major new initiative, the session did give the governor a platform for responding to critics of his Aug. 9 announcement.

Wilson said an identification card is the key to the enforcement of any of the sanctions written into federal law against employers who hire illegal immigrants for jobs in the United States. Without it, such sanctions are unenforceable, he said.

“Until we deal with the problem of document fraud, anyone proposing additional employer sanctions is simply blowing hot air,” Wilson said after examining stacks of phony passports, Social Security cards and other false documents confiscated by the INS.

Critics, including potential Democratic gubernatorial challenger Kathleen Brown, have said Wilson’s plan cracks down on illegal immigrants but not on the employers who also violate the law by hiring them.

Last week, Brown, the state treasurer, endorsed a national tamper-proof Social Security card that would have to be presented to a prospective employer before the cardholder could be hired.

In his lengthy Aug. 9 letter to Clinton, Wilson called on the federal government to compensate California for the cost of services to illegal immigrants, called for stricter enforcement of the California-Mexico border, and said children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants should not automatically become U.S. citizens or be eligible to attend public schools in California.

Wilson made no mention of stronger enforcement against employers. He proposed an identification card as something that foreign nationals in the country legally would present to qualify for state services.

Wilson said California’s modern holographic drivers licenses could be the model for a federal card, but a reporter wondered if even they could be forged, since a photographic blowup of one was among the fake IDs on display.

“You know, I don’t dispute the ingenuity of counterfeiters. . . . I think it is possible to stay technologically ahead of even expert counterfeiters,” Wilson said.

“The question really is not whether you’re going to have an entirely foolproof system, but whether you have one that works to achieve its major goal, which is to screen out the vast majority of counterfeit documents.”

Later in the day, Democratic state Chairman Bill Press chided Wilson for intervening with the INS in 1989 on behalf of a San Diego supporter, Anne Evans, whose hotels were under investigation for hiring illegal immigrants. At the time, Wilson was a U.S. senator.

Evans ultimately was accused of 362 violations of employer sanctions provisions and fined $70,000.

Schnur described Wilson’s letter, which sought a conciliation between the INS and Evans, as a routine constituent service.