With Christmas coming up, everyone is already watching their holiday favorites.  Whether you’re a big fan of Will Ferrell’s antics in “Elf,” an admirer of the classics like “A Christmas Story,” or even the rare breed of “Die Hard” disciples, everyone knows that movies are one of the pillars of the Christmas season. But one type of film is hardly mentioned, or at least not nearly as respected as the others: Hallmark movies.

These films are nothing short of a cash grab. Hallmark produces around 30-40 Christmas films per year, so don’t expect anything to stand out in the plot or the acting. If you are watching a film that you might think is a Hallmark film, look for these five things:

1. A strong-willed, small town character that flips out the second someone makes a negative comment on the town. 
2. An equally strong-willed, big city character that somehow stumbles into the town and has to stay for a while.
3. These characters absolutely hate each other, but end up finding that they have a lot in common.
4. Some random event happens (the big city character has to move back, one of the characters “cheat” on the other, etc.) which leads to them separating.
5. They always end up celebrating Christmas together as a couple.

I would bet both of my kidneys that you couldn’t find a single Christmas movie from Hallmark that doesn’t have all five of these rules.

But that does not make these types of Christmas films necessarily bad: most of these clichés happen with most romance films (rules 3-5) that are not even associated with the holidays.