We went to Hallmark's first Christmas Experience. What the movie brought to life was like
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Like a scene from a Hallmark movie that you watch while cozied up on your couch, the season’s first big snowfall here coincided with the opening weekend of the brand’s Christmas Experience. Saturday, a freshly fallen white blanket covered Crown Center Square, near Hallmark headquarters, like cotton in a Christmas village.
The cost of the perfectly-timed snow is “a company secret,” Darren Abbott, Hallmark's chief brand officer, joked during Saturday’s premiere of “Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.” The feature, which includes a Donna Kelce cameo, is a meeting under the mistletoe between the Hallmark crown and the NFL, a new partnership.
For four weekends through Dec. 22, attendees can walk through the Square lined with vendors offering five golden rings (and permanent jewelry), Blitzen’s BBQ, Christmas tamales, or even bacon brittle if figgy pudding isn’t your thing. Visitors can ice skate as Christmas tunes fill the air and a 100-foot lighted tree makes the atmosphere even merrier and brighter.
There are Hallmark movie marathons, workshops for creating your own holiday décor and panels with network stars spilling behind-the-scenes secrets about their projects. “Haul Out the Holly” star Melissa Peterman shared that while filming during a heat wave, the fake snow sizzled on the ground. She added that if she was wearing a long coat in a scene, she wasn’t wearing pants underneath. During another panel, “Finding Mr. Christmas” co-creator and host Jonathan Bennett sent the crowd into a frenzy when he pretended to auction off fan-favorite Tyler Hynes’ hotel-room key.
“The Hallmark Christmas Experience is really a way for us to immerse our fans in a Hallmark world,” Lindsey Roy, senior vice president of branded experiences, told Paste BN. “Bringing the charm of a movie square to life, bringing the talent right to the doorstep, if you will. It's been something that we've dreamed of and are so happy to make our fans happy because we love them.”
Friends 'watch Hallmark 24 hours a day'
Friends Laura Barth, Margie Bucsa and Ruth Sanzone warmed up Saturday sipping hot cocoa by a fire in the square. The frosty temperature was a little chillier than the pool, where the sexagenarians do Aqua Zumba classes. Sanzone, a self-described “Hallmark junkie,” first saw an advertisement for the festival in June, “and we were like, ‘We're going! Girls trip,’” she said.
So they piled into Barth’s white SUV, “currently sporting some candy cane antlers and nose, and a Grinch on the front (secured) with a magnet,” Barth said.
“We started out with a lot more decorations,” Sanzone revealed, “But we lost them because she did 100 miles an hour all the way here.”
“Shush! Shush!” Barth protested to her friends’ amusement. “That's going to be in the newspaper, Ruth!”
Hallmark's sweeter-than-real-life movies are “the anti-me,” Sanzone explained. “If you knew me in real life, I am so not a romantic person.”
“You would never suspect we watch Hallmark 24 hours a day,” Barth added. “But we do.”
Bucsa, the romantic of the group, loves the movies because they’re “pure and clean and nice.”
Daughters gift their grieving mom holiday cheer
Later Saturday, Dee Chavosky sat in a row with her two daughters and cousin awaiting the Hallmark stars' ho-ho-high-jinks during a Reindeer Games panel. Chavosky, 78, wore one of the shirts her daughters made her, calling for “Christmas lights, Hallmark nights.” Another customized creation reads, “So many Hallmark men, so little time.”
“I love Hallmark!” Chavosky declared. “The movies are so much fun. They're just feel-good movies.” She and her husband watched “all the time” before he died in March after 62 years together. They could recite the lines before the actors because they’d seen the films so many times. They especially loved the moments when one of the romantic leads, while beginning to fall for the other, says, "‘Oh, you have something on your face.’”
Chavosky’s daughter, Dana, said she and her sister wanted to bring their mom to the Christmas Experience to “give her something to think about other than the fact that Dad's not here to be with her during the holidays.”
Chavosky assigned them “homework”: watching 20 to 30 holiday movies, Dana said. “Every week, we had to watch certain Hallmark movies and understand who the actors were so that we knew who we were meeting when we met them here.”
Chavosky quizzed them on “certain points in movies,” Dana added, “so you couldn't fake it.”
Chavosky said her husband would have been thrilled about her brief interaction with Tyler Hynes as he was getting into an elevator. She and her husband were high school sweethearts, Chavosky said. “And he was my best friend and always was and always will be.”
A fan tells Benjamin Ayres, 'You are in bed with me every single night'
For Benjamin Ayres, star of this season’s “The Santa Class” (premiering Dec. 14, 8 EST/PST), one interaction with a fan he estimates to be 85 years young sticks out in his mind. Her nighttime visions were a little steamier than sugar plums dancing in her head.
“She said, ‘You are in bed with me every single night,’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am,’” Ayres recalled Saturday wearing a big grin. “And I said, ‘I'll see you tonight,’ and she goes, ‘Yes, you will.’ It was awesome.”
'I really wanted to be here for (the stars) because they've been so good to me'
On Sunday, Paula Rose waited excitedly in line for a photo with eight of the network’s stars. The 70-year-old from Cincinnati said that while she considered attending, her best friend convinced her over cocktails.
“I told her, ‘I really want to go to the Hallmark Experience, and I want to do everything. I want to just get the top package,” Rose remembered. “She says, ‘Paula, you better go’” because she “just wants me to do something for me.”
Rose likes Hynes, Wes Brown and Kristoffer Polaha, all present for a photo-op, but considers all of the stars favorites. “The movies bring me a lot of happiness and some crying,” she added. "Truly, I really look forward to it all the time.”
When it was Rose’s turn for a photo, Hynes greeted her warmly by rubbing her back and asked if she was enjoying herself. The “Holiday Touchdown” star has a dedicated following, dubbed the Hynies, that he takes time to thoughtfully engage with, in person and online.
On the photo-op stage, Hynes’ co-star Hunter King listened intently while Rose spoke and then sweetly told her, “Thank you for being here.” When it was time to pose, Hynes, Brown and Polaha cozied up to Rose. It was just one of the many picture-perfect moments from the weekend.
And the more I talk to Hallmark fans, the more I understand what the movies mean to them. Some cynics might roll their eyes at what they see as a trope.
Sanzone, one of the funny friends by the fire, joked that when she’s watching a movie and her sons are home, “they're like, ‘Vomit. It doesn't go like this.’” But for fans, the movies provide perpetual happy endings, a balm for real life which so frequently goes off script. And in Hallmark’s snowy winter wonderland, which turned reality into a romance movie, it felt like a Christmas wish come true.