Fucking Day: Finding Mr. Christmas 🌭 (Patreon)

Come with me to the Hallmark Christmas Hunk preserve. Hallmark has constructed an environment that feels natural to the Christmas Hunks. They’ve got a log cabin that looks a little rustic but actually costs 1.5 million dollars. It’s surrounded by fake snow, but the background is clearly all green. Inside, they can wear sweaters, and drink cocoa, and oh my God, it’s not a preserve at all! They’re hunting them! They’re on the hunt for Mr. Christmas.

The Hallmark Channel decided to jump into reality TV with a hunk hunt, and it’s incredible. They found a bunch of men who seem like real-life Hallmark heroes and made them compete for a chance to pretend to be exactly who they are. The average Finding Mr. Christmas hunk’s backstory is, “Well, I used to be a rescue swimmer in the Navy, but I quit to take care of my Grandma and kiss tiny little birds all day. It’s a serious avian flu risk, but it makes the birds so happy.”

Each man is given a personality clearly chosen by the producers, and they hammer home those personality talking points hard. Some of the personalities are normal things like cowboy, firefighter, former athlete, and generically handsome, and some are things like old guy, was in Hamilton, and divorced dog dad. I made a helpful graphic so you can remember everyone.

In each episode, there’s a “Festive Face-Off,” which is basically a little bit of Christmas-themed torture for the hunks, and whoever wins gets an advantage in their “Star-Quality challenge,” which is generally in some way an acting challenge. In the Festive Face-Off, the hunks do things like cut down a Christmas tree and run an obstacle course with it, untangle an enormous ball of Christmas lights, or wrap an awkwardly shaped Christmas present. When one of them said he wraps Christmas presents by asking his Mom for help, they essentially built ejector seats and catapulted him out of the building. Sorry, women love a hunk who can wrap a present.

The show doesn’t really kick off until episode two. In episode one the firefighter gets eliminated because he reads lines like he’s never seen words before, a common hunk problem. In episode two the hunks get a modeling challenges and with that challenge come two fantastic things: puppies and Tyler Hynes. You may recall from my previous work that I didn’t really get Hallmark star Tyler Hynes, but the thing I’ve realized is that acting is only a third of what’s important about being a Hallmark Hunk. Hallmark does tons of fan events, cruises, and conventions, and that’s where Tyler Hynes shines. This man GETS the female gaze. He took one look at a contestant trying to figure out how to pose and said, “Take off your shirt and wrap the Christmas lights around your torso.” Tyler Hynes is for the girls!

He’s this hyper confident short king who’s never met a piece of furniture he can’t drape himself across casually, and he makes all of the wanna be Mr. Christmases look like chumps. Why are we hunting Mr. Christmas? He’s right there. Take him down, fellas.

So earlier, I made the statement that one of the potential Mr. Christmases chose the personality of Divorced Dog Dad, an insane combination of words, and I blew right past it, but here is the part where I explain. Hayden’s wife took the dog in the divorce, and he is sad about it. So you can imagine that he bursts into tears when presented with the puppy for this challenge. Tyler Hynes comforts him, and it’s pretty adorable, but then we have to watch “I miss my dog” become his whole personality for the rest of the show, and he ends up in the top two. I guess women love a man who is sad about a dog. The aerospace engineer got eliminated in episode 2 because the puppy hated him, which is a great reason to kick a man out of anywhere.

I call episode three the Injuries Episode because it begins with a contestant dropping out because his retina randomly took a vacation from his eyeball, and he went blind. Then Old Man Parker sliced his hand open on the Christmas lights they were supposed to be untangling, and then they announced everyone was going to have to ice skate. I’m cackling, I’m screaming, I’m throwing up. Either I have been poisoned, or I love watching the hunk torture. My transition into festive Jigsaw is complete.

Sadly, no one broke any bones during the ice-skating challenge, but they did have a girl fall down in front of the hunks as a test of “heart”. Almost all of the hunks gallantly helped the girl to her feet, except for one, and that generic hunk immediately had his magic hat taken away and dissolved into a pile of lifeless snow.

Episode four centered around a talent show; the talents included square dancing, folding a fitted sheet, rollerblade bartending, and jumping very high. I didn’t make up a single one of those. Old Man Parker got sent home for talking about his wife too much during a fake interview with E! News, and probably also for not sacrificing enough blood to the blood God during his Christmas lights challenge.

But WAIT! Hallmark movies are all about second chances. (I thought they were mostly about getting railed on a Christmas Tree farm, but sure, Hallmark, go off.) They decide to let the remaining hunks vote on whether Parker can return, and they unanimously vote to bring him back! Only to see him kicked off the very next episode. In a way, it was cruel to give him a second chance. Hallmark is all about giving second chances and then immediately taking them away for entertainment.

Now we’re getting to the part in a reality competition show where we need to see some tears. The men are forced to do a dramatic breakup scene, and Hayden gives the actress in the scene a squeaker that supposedly belonged to his beloved former dog to hold because he feels it will help him “connect with her emotionally.” This should have gotten him eliminated, but it doesn’t. Hallmark loves the painful loss of a dog.

Hayden is probably the best actor in the group, which honestly makes me wonder if the dog is even real. I have a dog-based conspiracy theory that I won’t share with you because the dog estrangement storyline is testing so well.

The best episode is the one where they made the hunks attempt to do improv, which I’m calling Festive Jigsaw. These poor hunks don’t know how to have thoughts, which is why they need the safety of the hunk preserve to survive. There is no ethical way to hunt hunks. You can tell the remaining hunks' spirits are truly broken as we approach the finale. Generic Hunk Ezra, Divorced Dog Dad Hunk Hayden, Cowboy Hunk Blake, and Hamilton Hunk Elijah are all that remain of our dwindling hunk supply. I’m going to give you a spoiler alert for the ending by letting you know that Ezra is the tallest hunk.

To lift their spirits, production flew in special women from their lives. Mostly their sisters; Elijah’s pregnant girlfriend was allowed in, too, even though he mentioned her way less than Hayden mentioned his precious dog. I swear, for one second, I really thought they might have gotten Hayden’s dog as his special guest. I know production reached out, and his ex-wife said absolutely not. They had to settle for his sister. Everyone was bummed.

The sisters are there to watch them perform a dance that one of the instructors from Dancing with the Stars taught them. Blake the cowboy can only square dance, so he is fed to the reindeer along with the other past hunks. This left only Hayden, Ezra, and Elijah. Of course, they simply lined up the hunks and let the longest one win. Congratulations to Ezra, here he is on the poster for his Hallmark Christmas movie:

What do you mean, Ezra’s Hallmark movie actually stars two cute dogs? They chose the tallest man. How could he not be the best at the job? Has he worked on any other Hallmark movies since he won the contest last year? It looks like they gave him a small role in 2025’s Christmas On Duty, but he is not the leading man.

Hayden got a better Hallmark ending than Ezra. By that I mean he’s the only man who does not own a dog that’s selling fifty-dollar dog sweaters on his personal website, AND he started a podcast with the contestant who had the detached retina called Blondies: Out Loud. As we all know, a podcast is one of the best ways to gain fame and money, even better than playing a supporting actor to a dog in a Hallmark movie.

Hallmark must have considered this project a success despite the fact that it did not yield a leading man for them. After all, they need an almost unlimited quantity of bland hunks to feed into the Christmas machine, so if one isn’t a success, they’ll simply gather a new batch and begin the hunt again in Finding Mr. Christmas season two, where the prize will be the lead role in a Hallmark film that’s actually about two Pangolins finding love at Christmas.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Max Baroi, the king of Christmas Hunks. If he had his own streaming channel where he stood around in christmas sweaters for 84 minutes while different puppies waddled on and off screen, we'd be the first subscribers.

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